The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

The Discipline of the Visual Narrative with Debbie Millman

Debbie Millman has taken a rather unconventional approach to the process of brand strategy. The discipline of the visual narrative has been the driving force behind her work as writer, educator and a brand consultant.

Here are a few of the highlights from our conversation

How working on a student newspaper shaped Debbie’s career
The role that the contemporary culture of 70’s influenced Debbie’s art
How brands influence of our emotions and impacted Debbie’s life
Finding vehicles that help you to navigate the turbulence of life
Why you need interesting enough reasons to create your art
The reason you’re not entitled to make any money from your art
Having endeavors that are purely creative and not about making money
Why there is no amount of money that will make you safe
Living in a 140 character culture and why it’s not success
Why success is earned over a series of accomplishments
The reason finding success in your 20’s is not the common
Recognizing moments that mold us into who we are
Learning to identify the difference between failure and defeat
The common denominator of self doubt that we all share
The danger of becoming satisfied with the quality of your work
Why growing older gives you much more material to work with
Mixing different art forms and pulling from different disciplines
Understanding why people are attracted to certain brands and experiences
The power and necessity of deliberate differentiation

Debbie Millman. is a writer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the radio show Design Matters

Resources and People Mentioned

Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

A Resume of my Failures

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Duration:: 1h 6m
Broadcast on:: 10 Mar 2014
Audio Format:: other

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Great to be here. Yeah. So, you know, I came across your work by way of Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings. And I mean, she's mentioned you so many times and then I ended up buying one of your books. And, you know, I became more and more intrigued with your work because, you know, I know you say, you know, you're in your career, you're a brand strategist, but I look at it and I look at the way you approach it. And, you know, in my mind, I saw you as an artist first and a brand strategist second, which is what appealed to me so much about what you do and, you know, why I felt that you were so different from, you know, many of the brand branding people we even had here on the show. So, I guess, really, what I want to start really is with your story and your background and how that has led you to doing the work that you're doing today. Well, let's see. I've been living in Manhattan and working in Manhattan for over 30 years. And living in Manhattan was probably one of the few things that I ever knew with certainty I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I'm actually a native New Yorker, I was born in Brooklyn. I also lived in Queens and on Staten Island, believe it or not. The only borough I haven't lived in is the Bronx. But I knew from a very young age that New York City was where I was going to both be born and die. Everything else, though, was up for grabs. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was growing up. I had no idea what I wanted to be. I tried on all sorts of different hats over the years, thinking I wanted to be a singer or a fashion designer or a teacher or any number of things. And I came to design and then branding quite by accident. I went to college for the sole reason. The sole reason I chose the college that I ended up going to is because my best friend at the time was going. Not particularly criteria I would advise using. Not that there's anything wrong with going where your best friend is going, but there probably should be some other criteria that are included when making a big life decision like that. But I got lucky in a lot of ways because I ended up at a school that had one of the best student newspapers in the country at the time. And ultimately, after several years of going there, I ended up working on the student newspaper and that really shaped my career because I, for the first time, was learning and growing and involved in a culture that also gave me a marketable skill, which at the time was paced up in layout. I thought I wanted to be an editor and a writer at the time, but what working on the student newspaper gave me was the ability not only to write the pieces but also shape and design how they looked in the paper. The editor was also the art director and the layout artist. And so I realized very early on that I had as much, if not more interest in how something looked in the paper as how it read. And so when I graduated college in 1983, it was very hard for me to find a job in journalism but quite easy for me to find a job at a magazine doing layout and paced up. And that's really where my career in design began. Well, there's a lot of, it's always interesting for me to look back at the earlier part of somebody's background. And I love that you brought up, you're born in New York and you're going to die in New York. And I think back to a collection of essays that I've stumbled upon, which may have made its way to you, called writers on loving and leaving New York than anthology. And I've been reading it and I'm like, wow, this is the greatest thing ever. I am not a New York person by any stretch of the imagination. I'm very much a West Coast. I'm like, get me the hell out of the cult person on the spot. But one of the things I'm very curious about, I mean, your approach to this is so unique and I'm very curious about sort of the early influences in your life and that have shaped you sort of as a creative person, as an artist. I mean, when you're growing up, like obviously an ecosystem like New York, I think lends itself naturally to being a creative person, but not everybody comes out of New York and ends up you. So I'm really curious about some of those early influences in your life. Well, I was really, really influenced by contemporary culture, the contemporary culture of the '70s and still am to a large degree. I was obsessed with music, I was obsessed with television, movies, I was, my childhood was actually pretty brutal and everybody's childhood is brutal in some ways. But mine was particularly brutal in that I didn't have a lot of guidance and suffered quite a lot of violence. And so I escaped as much as I possibly could into my own fantasies and used a whole slew of things as vehicles in which to do that. So early on I was really, really into creating stories, creating my own little worlds of paper dolls and magazines and anything that I could project what a perfect life could be, I would create to be able to have some way of coping, I guess, with the turbulence that I was experiencing in real life. So I would create these sort of fake lives, I guess, these two-dimensional experiences that would allow me to be creative and safe at the same time. And so one of the things that I used to be able to get quite a lot of enjoyment from was projecting into brands. And so I think that's when my love affair with brands first began when I realized that by using the brands to help buoy up my otherwise sort of fragile interior life, I could survive. And I could survive for a couple of minutes feeling good about myself because these sneakers or these jeans or this doll or whatever it was for a very brief time made me feel better about who I was and the problem with brands is that we metabolized them really quickly. So that doesn't last, that feeling of being buoyed up didn't last, but it helped tremendously. And I think it helped shape who I am in really profound ways. So I love this, this is precisely why I wanted to have you on the show because I knew there's a very different approach to how you do things, but you said something in that part of our conversation where you said it became a vehicle for dealing with the turbulence of your life. And yeah, maybe people listening don't have violence per se, but I think the some degree we're dealing with what I call an epidemic of unhappiness. I mean, I was a happiness researcher here, he said job dissatisfaction is at an all-time high. And what I'm curious about is how do we find our own vehicles for dealing with the turbulence of everyday life, because I mean, what I realized for me when I look back is 10 years ago when I got fired from my first job I wrote, when I graduated from college without a dime to my name I wrote, when I graduated from undergrad I wrote, I mean it was always something that I turned to, but I'm curious, how do people find their own vehicles? I think you have to be aware that you want to find a vehicle. I think that you have to be certainly aware of what you need the vehicle for, but I also think that if you're doing something and I spent a lot of time in my life always going back to different things as well, I went back to painting, I went back to writing, certain things that I depended on and didn't necessarily have to worry about the opportunity or the thing that I went back to going away, because it wasn't a structure in my life that allowed it to either go away or to stay, it was just something that I did or didn't do based on my own desire to either do it or not to do it. But I would suspect that if you are going back to certain things with regularity as sort of de facto states it very well may need to be the state that you allow yourself to be in more regularly because it seems to me that that's the area of your life that you trust. It's interesting that you say that that's the area of your life that you trust because sometimes the reason I turned to a blank page is it was the only place where I felt like I wasn't being judged. Yeah, exactly. I think Jessica Hish talks about this quite a lot, the great graphic designer and letter and self professed cat lady, she talks about being a procrastinator or a procrast worker, that's how she puts it, and suggests that whatever you're doing when you're procrastinating is likely the thing that you should be earning money doing. Yeah, I mean it's really, well I think that makes a perfect setup for what I want to get into next, but yeah, I mean it's funny because I realized this morning I was writing and I said this is when I'm in my element, this is it, this is what I'm always craving almost all the time I need this in my life. And I said, 10 years ago there was nobody reading but I was still writing 10 years from now there may be nobody reading or listening and I'll still be writing. Right, well you also have to think about and I think quite deeply who are you doing it for? And if you're doing it for an audience, if you're doing it for accolades, if you're doing it for feedback, chances are those aren't sort of interesting enough reasons to get people engaged in whatever it is you're doing, because it's manipulative you're doing it for the feedback, you're doing it for the response. I think that it's probably more likely that you'll be given accolades for doing something if you're not seeking them specifically, but why are you doing it, what are the motivations for doing something, are you doing it because you have no choice, because you have to, because you can't live without doing it, or are you doing it because you need something from someone else? Just start, you need something from someone else, you're not going to get it by doing the thing that you think you need to. Okay, you just hit one of my hot buttons, because this to me honestly, like it's really easy to, I think that I understood it intellectually, like when somebody like you told it to me, Danielle Laport, who's a friend of ours and has been on the show multiple times, told me once your art can never be about the money and my response has always been, well that's easy for you to say, but I can tell you when I got it, it was like night and day, everything changed, and it was, I mean, like you talked about, the accolades came and it was really weird, because suddenly they didn't matter anymore, but I'm really curious, I mean, I want to dig deeper into this, is there, I mean for you, was there a point at which you made that shift mentally where it was no longer about the external things you regain from making art, and you know, how do people get there, because I can tell you, a lot of people are going to listen to that, and you know, it's the person struggling who has nobody reading whatever they're working on, or nobody listening to their music, or you know, nobody buying with whatever they're making, and they're thinking, yeah, that's easy for you guys to say. Well, I don't think that there's a lot of easy things that can be said about doing what you love, and being paid to do what you love, the fact of the matter is, I never felt and still struggle with feeling entitled to make money from my art, and I don't actually make money from my art, and I don't make money from my podcast, and I don't make much money from my books. I actually set my life up because I was in a way that was structured because I was afraid that I couldn't make money doing all of the things that I love, and I've written about this actually quite substantially. In the summer of 1983, when I graduated, I affectionately referred to that summer as the summer of modern, David Bowie's modern love, and the police's synchronicity. Those are the two of the big summer albums back in the day when there were albums. But I had tremendous aspirations. I had aspirations to be a writer, and a painter, and a poet, and any number of creative things, but did not feel even the remote possibility that I could make a living doing any of those things, and had absolutely no confidence in my ability to do pretty much anything. I started looking for a job after I graduated, and after a couple of weeks, without any success, was seriously, seriously considering going to secretary of school so that I could learn how to type and become a secretary. Thankfully, I was able to get a job at a magazine doing layout and paste-up. I was making $6 an hour doing old school page layout. But I did that because I didn't think I had any other choice. It never occurred to me that I could make a living doing my first choice, doing my first love and spend 20-something years working and becoming more and more successful in an industry that was not my first choice, that was my choice because I needed to make money, because I needed to pay my own way, because I needed to be self-sufficient, and because I had no one that I could depend on to do any of those things for me. So, for me, it became, "How do I, if I want to live an authentic life, if I want to live a life that isn't a complete waste, if I want to live a life that isn't about commerce and just making money, then I have to try to figure out a way to do that alongside what I've been calling my day job all these years." So, really wasn't until I started doing design matters that I did anything that was, in any way, a public endeavor that was also purely creative and not about making money or helping to pay my rent. So, I mean, it can be done. If you feel like you need to live a life that is first and foremost, the lead gene of which is security, and for me, it was. For me, it was for a lot of reasons. One, because I desperately needed to feel secure in my life, and two, because I didn't feel qualified or talented enough to depend on my artistic ability or lack thereof to make a name for myself. I multitasked. I did the day job and spent a long time ignoring my creative aspirations or my purely creative aspirations, because I do think that there is an element of being creative and what I do during my day job, but then made enough money to feel a little bit safe, because the fact of the matter is what's sad about that whole concept is that if you don't feel safe, no amount of money is ever going to make you feel safe, and I've had to contend with that dilemma and dichotomy, and then worked sort of on the side doing my self-generated work and have been doing that simultaneously now for the last eight years or so. So, this is great because there's so much, you know, such a rich conversation here, and there's a lot to be sort of torn apart and dissected here, but I love that you've brought up this idea of not everybody is going to make a living from their art, and it's weird. I think that we live in a world that actually puts pressure on people in a way like never before to say, "Hey, look at me over here, I'm doing this awesome thing, living this awesome life," and I've beat this like a dead horse on the show, but I'm saying everybody's life looks more epic than yours when you're online. Oh, absolutely, and you know, all we're doing online is positioning ourselves, you know, it's what brands do every day. We're just positioning ourselves to be perceived in a specific way, whether or not it's true or authentic is a completely different conversation, really. The only thing that I can tell you about making it quickly is that everything meaningful takes a long time, and the other sort of quote of note of mine is that I've been saying lately that I feel like we are living in a 140 character culture where everything has to happen, you know, really truncated and super fast and telegraphic. And I just don't think that success is like that. I don't think that success is something that you get. I think success is something that is earned, and it's earned over a series of accomplishments. It tends not to be overnight, it tends not to be fleeting if there's something meaningful behind it, and it takes a certain level, I think, of self-awareness to even know what you should become successful for. And we don't know that when we're in our 20s, I mean, it's the rare genius that can do something in their 20s that sustains them for the rest of their lives. Yeah, well, my early 20s are a complete train wreck, so by 20s, basically, I think there's a post on Medium titled, "The Resume of My Failures," and that more or less sums up my entire 20s. Oh, yeah, I mean, I talk about it at length, and my 20s were a whole decade of experiments in failure and despair. Yeah, I think that's common. I love that you brought up, this isn't an overnight thing, and of course, I think everybody's like, "Oh, well, overnight success." I spoke with Mason Curry, I'm sure you're probably familiar with his new book, "Daily Rituals," I was chatting with him yesterday, and the conclusion that I woke up with this morning, when I was doing my daily writing session, I said, "You know what? Working art is a lifetime commitment, and that's the only thing I've realized from all of this," and I'm like, "I'm going to basically probably die with a pen in my hand in a notebook in my pocket," either that or having had a good meal and after great sex, more ideally the second. But yeah, I'm really glad you brought up the self-awareness piece, because I think that really makes a perfect setup for talking about what I want to get into next. You mentioned throughout college, you kind of had inklings for different careers, different things you wanted to do, and there's a lot of things that come for this for me. I mean, our education system today, especially I feel, gives us sort of a limited view into what's possible, because they kind of say, "Hey, these are the options on the table," and nobody ever put the idea in my head that you don't have to choose from the options on the table. But I think there's something else here that's actually much deeper from me that you said is that when you went in to do layout work, you recognized that you enjoyed the visual look and feel of it, which, you know, being exposed to your work, that's not shocking at all to me. But what I'm really curious about is, you know, recognizing that you're in one of those moments that, "Hey, you know what, something special is going on here," because clearly, that whole idea has made itself into your work later on in your life. And I'm really curious, even what are your thoughts on that? I mean, how do we know when we're in those moments that could mold us into who we become later on? Oh, that's such a good question. There is no way to know. All I can tell you is that one of the moments that I felt was the most humiliating and depressing and sort of demoralizing ended up being one of the most important moments of my life. And so I think that most people see rejection as failure. And I don't think that something can be deemed a failure until you actually stop trying. Then it's a failure. Failure is really not a defeat until you stop trying. Failure is an obstacle as is rejection. And I think that that's something that people don't fully understand. They see obstacles as dead ends and they're not. I think that every experience is filled with some type of obstacle or some type of challenge. And we have to work through those, not retreat. And I think it's not so much the problem that is paralyzing. It's the notion that we can't get over the problem that becomes paralyzing. Oh, yeah, I think that this is another one of those things that we've endlessly talked about is I have found that once your circumstances and your identity become intertwined, you're basically into a downward spiral. And it's so easy to compare ourselves. You talked about comparing to these other epic lives. Well, when you do as many interviews as I think you and I have both done with people, you very quickly realize that there is a common denominator and the common denominator that almost everyone on this planet shares is self-doubt. We don't know how we compare to others and we're always judging ourselves and we're comparing ourselves to others and we think that people have it better because we just assume that they do. You know, with all the interviews that I've done and I've done probably close to 300 interviews, whether they be on my podcast or in my books or in real life, the common denominator that all of the thought leaders and writers and designers all seem to have is this sense of self-doubt, some as deep as self-loathing. No one I've interviewed wakes up every day and thinks, "Yay, today I'm going to be a genius again." You know, the only two people that I've ever interviewed that have sort of a sustained sense of who they are and what they've accomplished are Milton Lazer and Massimo Vignelli. And I really attribute that to they're both in their 80s, you know? By then I would hope that it's like, "Okay, what you see is what you get." 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Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com/results to claim your credit that's linkedin.com/results. Terms and conditions apply linkedin, the place to be to be expand the way you work and think with Claude by anthropic, whether brainstorming solo or working with the team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages and solving complex problems, plus Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy and reliable. So you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. It's really interesting you bring that up. Like you said, I've interviewed 400 people. It took me a very long time to get myself away from that idea of comparison. I was finally told, by the way, your set point is completely screwed up. Your perception is off because look at who you interview. They're like the upper echelon of creatives. We've had people like Scott Adams here. How many of us are going to become the world's most famous syndicated cartoonist? Right. Exactly. But I would guarantee that he wakes up and worries if he can do it again, just like everybody else. Yeah. I think it's such an interesting thing that you find that as the common denominator. I guess for me, one of the other common denominators that I've consistently found, when I look back at hundreds of interviews, I'm like, what's the common thread, pain, for every single one of them? Somehow, somewhere, it seems to be the one thing that actually molds them in the way into who they are. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the difficult moments of our lives help shape us in really a sad way. Because we then start to, you know, we have a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder over those experiences. And if we're not careful, we use those experiences as a foundation of what we expect of our lives or what we expect from others. And it really does limit what we can achieve or what we can accomplish or what we can do because we're always sort of fighting against that bad thing happening again, as opposed to realizing that if it did, you know, we might respond to it differently because we have more experience or we might be stronger than we think. But there's so much trauma that occurs in people's lives that we have such difficulty letting go of and it shapes who we become in such profound ways that I think we'd just be so much better off as a species if we had some more codified way to be able to manage those situations with more support, with more resources, with more education, with more empathy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No doubt. I mean, I think it's one of those things. To me, I guess that that's why I've always turned to writing or to other creative pursuits which seem to have been my escape from all those things. But the issue with using things as an escape is that it becomes a sidebar or a wormhole that you sort of burrow into. I think that there's so much shame involved in the trauma that we've all sort of experienced that prevents us from living our fullest life because we're so ashamed of what that trauma has done to us. And that's really what I think becomes so insidious. I thought I want to be a real buzzkill here. Well, don't worry. I'm going to get you off of this thread pretty soon. But I do think if there are ways for us to share in the experience of our common traumas in a way that was more enlightened than shameful, we'd grow exponentially as a species. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I mentioned you before we hit record here. We had our friend Meg Warden here who had spent two years in prison. And one of the things that she said in our chat was, you know, she knew that having a son, she realized she just made a very conscious choice that she would basically live her life making sure that that was not a shameful story. And the truth is that story has touched so many people in so many ways now for the better. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, let's do this. Let's shift gears a little bit. Like you said, we're getting a bit melancholy here. You know, we're going to bring people to keep going down this thread. You know, one of the things, like I said, that really at the beginning of a conversation I mentioned to you is, you know, when I came across your work on brain pickings and then I went and said, and it was like, you're a brand strategist? I said, much more of an artist than a brand strategist. So, you know, I mean, the way you approach your work, you know, I mean, even, you know, like I've thumbed through your books. I have one of the, I think the self-portrait as a trader. I have that one sitting on the coffee table at home and then, you know, I've stumbled up on the other ones in bookstores. And it's kind of like, this is so not the typical book that I was expecting for a branding book because, you know, you have these really crazy handwritten notes. I'm really, you know, what I want to really get into now is your creative process. I mean, how does this all come together? I mean, in my mind, you know, I mean, I love it, but I don't think anybody sits down and says, I'm going to write a marketing book. And you know what? I'm going to write it in letters and it's going to be handwritten. Some of it will be hard to read and, you know, I just, and to me, I was like, wow, there's so much we could learn from here. I love that you do this because it's so unique and so different. So I really, I would love for you to talk about your creative process and how you kind of arrived at this conclusion of this is how I'm going to make my art. Oh, you ask really tough questions. I told you, you know, you should have been warned. That's what happens if you don't listen to one of my episodes before you come on the show. I'm so sorry. No worries. I'm just kidding. But no, seriously, it's because I really honestly am very curious. Well, I think that for me, the notion of storytelling has always been a big part of who I am. How do I tell a story, whether it be a visual story, whether it be a verbal story, whether it be the story that I wish I lived in. And so when I, because I have been painting and drawing since I was very, very little, over the years as I was growing up, I was very, very interested in painting words. And when I was in my twenties and was, at that point, still dabbling in the idea that I could be an artist before I sort of gave it up, gave up the idea, I was doing quite a lot of work that first started as drawing words. And then because I was also writing simultaneously and because I was doing a lot of creative writing, the two sort of dovetailed, it was like sort of that Reese's commercial where the chocolate and the peanut butter fall into each other by accident, it was sort of that way for me where the writing and the creative aspect of drawing words overlapped in a way that felt really, really interesting to me. And at the time, I was cautioned by an artist named Catherine Umstead, who's also a very good friend, and at the time she was cautioning me to consider that if I was indeed going to draw words or draw language, that I needed to be sure that the quality of the writing was as good as the quality of the drawing and the quality of the drawing need to be as good as the quality of the writing, otherwise one would dilute or confuse the other. And I've taken that advice, that guidance really, really seriously, and so have worked really hard to continually try to increase my skill in both drawing and writing, both as individual disciplines as well as the discipline of visual narrative. In terms of writing and then designing or designing for something that is also written, I absolutely do one before the other, I always write what I'm going to draw first. I don't just sit with a box of creative tools and write and design at the same time. I create a piece of work that's either a poem or an essay or a short story or just a sentence. And I craft that until I feel that it is the best that I could possibly make it be. And then I go into taking that story and creating a visual expression of it, and that could take any number of forms, and usually does take any number of forms before I am confident that the form that I'm taking is the form it should be. So I might try any number of different experiments before I land on what I feel is the right methodology for expressing this particular story. And so it could be more conceptual, it could be more literal, I spend a lot of time thinking about method and materials, and I become a lot more sculptural in the kind of work that I'm doing where it becomes a three-dimensional piece, not just a two-dimensional flat drawing. I'm doing a lot with felt, and I'm doing a lot with sewing, and a lot more with construction, which I really, really liked. Okay, I love this. This is like hands-down, been my favorite part of our entire conversation. So I want to talk about two things here. You brought up this idea of the discipline of visual narrative, which I think is fascinating. That's probably what I'm going to title the interview. I want to talk about craftsmanship for a little bit. I mean, one of the things that we've really hit home as I've talked to several people probably for the last month or so is really the idea of mastering a craft, I mean I think that we are at a point where that is really what stands out on the internet. You can tell who is good at what they do. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious, you know, from both the writing and the drawing side, I mean, what have you noticed that has allowed you to work towards mastery, and what do you think it is that has, you know, what do you think of the common elements for people who really are masters of the craft? Well, first of all, you have to want to be somebody that continually improves, and not somebody that feels like they got what it takes at the moment. I find that the most interesting journeys I've seen artists take are the ones where they still feel like their best work is in front of them, or they're still really looking to unearth something new. Like one of my heroes is Paula Cher. Paula is in her sixties, and I think that she's still doing her best work. Like everything that she's doing is still interesting, and it still has a certain rigor in it. She's not resting on her laurels, she's still looking for new ways to express things. So I think that there needs to be a willingness to keep experimenting, keep taking risks, keep being willing to fail. So there's that. But I also think that there's something wonderful about aging, in that you have a much bigger body of experience to pull from. And so it's unfortunate that we see aging in this sort of really pejorative manner, and there's a lot of ageism now, of course, there's lots of isms, but it's certainly not something that people often talk about, "Oh, I'm really looking forward to getting older." But you do get an enormous amount of material just from living and just from experiencing, which I would not trade, I love the idea that I can pull from so many years now of experiments and experimenting, and so many failures even, and there is something really comforting about the idea of knowing that failure won't kill you, it won't destroy you, that you can start something all over again, and it's going to be just another opportunity to learn something about yourself, which is phenomenal, and necessary in order to keep growing. So there's that. There's also, I think, something to be said for the amount of resources there are now to help you get better, there's so much out there, so many classes to take, and courses that you can take, and books that you can read, and there's so much out there to make us better at what we want to be, more than there's ever been, there's so much access to information, and if you're not learning, then it's only because you're not looking, because there's so much that you can be inspired by, and be moved by, and be challenged by, and be excited by just by living in the world we're currently living in, so for me it's a constant everyday opportunity to learn, to improve my skills, to increase my ability to do anything, which is amazing, we all have that though, everybody has that now at their fingertips literally and figuratively. Yeah, I know that, I mean, I think it's really interesting that this whole idea of the discipline of visual narrative, one of the things that we, as people listening, know, and if you've seen our website, that we do a lot of visual work now, and the idea of blending visual work with writing, we got stuck on our about page, we're really bad at writing copy, so we knew what we wanted the about page to say, so we went to our illustrator, friend Sarah, we said, "Hey, this is what it needs to say, we think that you might know how to make it say that in a way that we can't," and what she came up with was mind-blowing, I mean, we were so blown away by it that, I mean, I write these daily essays on Facebook, which are basically thoughts from my moleskin, and it just occurred to me the other morning, I went to her and I said, "Hey, I think I have an idea, and I think we might have a missing link between the two of us that could actually be really awesome," I said, "What do you think about visually illustrating my essays? Because I can't draw with a dam." My drawing looks like stick figures at best, at worst there are anything I draw is unrecognizable. The idea of mixing different art forms is something that that's becoming more and more a part of the way I approach work, pulling from different disciplines, which I think really, that's what I want to talk about a bit more. You talked about how this art can take so many different forms, two-dimensional, three-dimensional. One of the things that has become very apparent to me through the process of writing this show is that somebody said to me once that you're calling in the expression of your calling are two entirely different things, how it's expressed in play itself out in so many different ways. I think that often one of the things I see as a trap is people listen to somebody here on our show, they read something, and they think that that's exactly how they're supposed to do it, even though it doesn't naturally align with them, like, "Hey, maybe you're calling is to maybe the way your art should be expressed is in the form of a film." Do you find that you inherently know which form is the one that something is meant to be expressed in and people can figure out for them what that is? I think that everybody has to figure out what's right for them. In terms of what's right for me, I find that I love to be surprised and I love to try different things very privately and clandestinely just to be able to experiment and not be embarrassed if it comes out looking badly. I love the notion of serendipity and I find that a lot of my work has a moment of serendipity in it and that just comes from thinking about things long enough or trying to experiment with things long enough and maybe that serendipity is just part of the process of discovery and maybe that serendipity is the discovery but I find that a lot of my ideas come when I least expect them and they require a leap of faith to make them happen. So I'll have an idea and then the idea isn't really enough. The idea needs to be Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my hundredth mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch whatever you're ready. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. 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Visit your neighborhood Sprouts Farmers Market today where fresh produce is always in season. Manifested and it's that manifestation that is where magic happens. A lot of people wait for an idea. They wait to have the manifestation of the idea before they are willing to experiment, but I think that even if you have a sliver of an idea, a sliver of hope, that if you can start to exercise that and play with it and mold it and shape it and let it shape you, that you're likely to find something interesting just in that act of doing. Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, yeah, I always say that the view keeps changing with every step forward. Like, you can't see certain things until you actually act on them. Yeah, but I think that we edit ourselves before we act and I find that like, oh, I don't know, it doesn't sound that good. I don't know if we're going to do that. There's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, we put our own obstacles in our own way. But I think that even if you have, if you have a desire to try something, try it. Don't wait for there to be something more concrete than just the desire. And we wait for that concrete thing to happen and we wait for that moment to feel ready and we wait for that, we think inspiration is going to hit. And, and I think we make that inspiration. You know, people are always talking about, you know, what inspires you and what do you, what, what do you find that that, but you know what, we make our own inspiration. And I think we have to put ourselves in a position to create inspiration, not just be inspired. Yeah, I guess, for me, that really, you know, we had somebody else here, she said, you judge yourself before you express yourself. Exactly, exactly. You're making the point far better than I can. Well, let's do this. You know, one of the things I want to, I know we're getting close to an hour. So I want to talk briefly about this. I mean, like I said, I, I'm very rarely interested in marketers and people whose title would be brand strategist, but I saw you as an artist first, but obviously you're a brand strategist. What I'm really curious about is how this makes its way into the work you do as a brand strategist. Like, how does this play out with sort of the iconic brands that you've worked on? Because I know you've worked on some of the biggest brands around. Well, that is the question of my life. And in many ways, I feel that my work is inextricably connected in that I believe that I understand fundamentally, intrinsically, it's sort of wired into my DNA, why people are attracted to brands, why they think they want brands in their lives, why we allow ourselves to believe that certain brands and certain things and certain experiences are going to change the way we feel about ourselves. And I have a tremendous amount of empathy for that. I have zero judgment for it. And so I am endlessly, endlessly fascinated by the psychology of why as a species we keep making things, why we mark things, why we brand things, why we designate things. I mean, branding, the shorthand definition for me about what branding is, is deliberate differentiation. And deliberate differentiation is not just relegated to brands. It's how we make sense of the world, and how we make sense of ourselves, and how we make sense of symbols, and how we make sense of the visual landscape that we're a part of. And so for me, it's not about branding, per se, it's about the craft of messaging and the craft of defining the reality of our lives. And so it's all very, very connected for me. Wow. I love that. I don't think anybody's ever explained it to me that way before. I mean, the way you're describing it, I almost see you as sort of a brand anthropologist of sorts. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly the way I would agree. Let me ask you this. I mean, in our own work, I mean, can we take things from what you've talked about and apply it to the work that we're doing? I think so. I mean, one thing that I feel is intrinsically important for people to understand when thinking about their lives and thinking about what they want to do, what they're capable of doing, or what they're ready to do in their lives, is the notion that as a species, our brains are hardwired in a very specific way to keep us safe and to keep us secure and to keep us alive. We don't like feeling vulnerable. We don't like feeling insecure. We don't like not knowing the future. And so we craft specific lives around those fears when, in fact, those fears limit the possibilities of our lives. And we are in this really vicious cycle of wanting to have so much in our lives, wanting our lives to mean so much, but also being paralyzed by the fear of not knowing if we try to get it, whether or not we're going to be successful. We'll never know. And we're never going to be in a position where we ever really feel all that good about not knowing. That's the reptilian part of our brain. We can't control it any more than you can control the adrenaline shot that you feel when you avoid being hit by a car. So I think that if you want something very badly in your life, but you're afraid to go after it because you're afraid to be in a vulnerable position or you're afraid to put yourself out there in a way that means that you're going to experience some type of shame or rejection, you must figure that out. You must analyze yourself in a way that allows you to simultaneously believe that you can be insecure, but you could also be successful at the same time. And there are many, many ways that you can get through that and make that happen. But you do need to understand what kind of help you need to get you there. So that's the first thing that I would say. The second thing is something that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, which is anything worthwhile takes a long time. And so if you expect success to be immediate, you're not really looking for success. You're looking for something much different. You're looking for reassurance. You're looking for a way to feel good about yourself that ultimately that success is not going to provide. And so again, another point that I made earlier, and this really comes from Dan Pink and his idea that we metabolize brands very quickly, I'm going to go a step further and say we metabolize everything very quickly. We are a species that metabolizes our food and we metabolize love, we metabolize everything. So anything that we use, and I'm using the word use in a very specific way, quotes around the word use, anything that we use to create a sense of how we feel about ourselves is fleeting. How we feel about ourselves is how we feel about ourselves. That baseline is something that we need to work on with without the accoutrements of our culture. And so if you're looking for anything outside yourself to make you feel better about yourself, it's a fool's game. Work on yourself first, figure out why you need these things and your journey in then getting those things will be much more educated and much more worthwhile. >> Wow. Well, I think that makes a really just fitting end to our conversation. So I want to close with my final question. Jokingly you said I finally figured out how to change up the ending question. So our show is called the unmistakable creative. And I mean, you've worked on iconic brands and you've talked to people who really honestly qualify as being unmistakable. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on in a world of this much noise. How do you become unmistakable? >> I think that you become unmistakable by making a lot of mistakes. And by sharing those mistakes in a meaningful way that allows other people to learn. >> I love it. Well, Debbie, it has been my absolute pleasure to have you here as a guest on the unmistakable creative. You've been fabulous as I knew you would be just from everything that you've worked on. I really honestly, I'm such a huge fan of everything that you do. It's such a different way of approaching work. And I think people are going to really learn a lot from our conversation. >> Thank you. It's really, really an honor to be on your show. I really appreciate it. And thanks for the really great thought-provoking questions. >> Thanks. And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. >> Thanks for listening in on another candid conversation at the unmistakable creative. Embrace your inner misfit. Express your creative voice. 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