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Episode 131—Debbie Millman on Illustrated Essays, the Poem That Defines Her Life, and her Podcast 'Design Matters'
137 Plays6 years ago
Welcome my CNFin’ buddy, how are YOU, doing? I’m @BrendanOMeara, Brendan O’Meara in real life and this is @CNFPod, or The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. If you want to get better at the form, you’ve come to the right place. This is our little corner of the Internet. If you’re here for the first time, welcome, welcome, crack open a notebook, pour yourself a cup of coffee and settle in, CNFers. Where to start, where to start? My guest is Debbie Millman. Yes, you heard that correctly. Your ears did not deceive you. I didn’t bother digging too deep into Debbie’s origin story because there are several podcasts where she dives into that and I wanted to spare her from repeating herself. Maybe I was too timid in that regard, but I figured I’d steer the ship toward other things. At this point in the introduction is usually where I riff …. on what’s going on, maybe offer some insights into how you can improve your work by sharing something I find helpful. But...sometimes the most helpful thing is getting the cuss out of the way. In 17 words Debbie Millman is a writer, designer, educator, artist, brand consultant, and host of the podcast Design Matters. But in a single word? Debbie is an inspiration. She made a name for herself as a graphic designer and branding guru after years and years of rejections, failures, and false starts. She’s persistent sometimes, she admits, to a fault. Her writing is tight and playful. It’s deep, meaningful, resonant, and beautiful to look at as most of her essays are illustrated in her whimsical way of inking and penciling. As for her career in branding, If you’ve seen the Burger King logo, various Pepsi products, Tropicana, Haagen Daas, and Twizzlers (totally twisted) then you’ve seen her work. If it makes the supermarket look prettier, odds are Debbie had a hand in that. She was the president of Sterling Brands for 20 years, and under her stewardship grew the company from 15 employees to 150. But after a decade of being a titan in her field, from 1995 to 2005, often at the expense of her own creative projects, her writing, her drawing, her painting, she was granted the opportunity to host an internet radio program that, I must add, she had to pay to produce, called Design Matters. This was in 2005. 14 years later and she’s still doing it and for my money she, along with Joe Donahue of WAMC Northeast Public Radio, are the best interviews around. I have a reason for this and I talk about this with Debbie. She has interviewed Milton Glaser, Malcolm Gladwell, Anne Lamott, Seth Godin, Shepard Fairey, and hundreds more. Design Matters is a testament to her endurance and generosity. It wasn’t until she had done the show for several years that it really began to gain traction, win awards, and become the behemoth that it is today. I could go on and on and I must apologize for my titanic nerves in this episode. I mean I suffer from them all the time, but this one was especially bad, for that I’m sorry, but getting the chance to speak to Debbie for nearly an hour was such an esteemed an honor that I had trouble keeping my you know what together. You made it this far so I must say thanks for listening. I do this for you guys so you know that even the best of the best deal with the same bullshit we’re all dealing with. If you haven't already, consider subscribing to the show on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher and subvert the algorithms across the social platforms. If you liked the show, share it with just one friend. Email them the link or share it on social media. And tag me @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod so I can toast to your awesomeness. Consider leaving an honest review on iTunes as well. I want to see it hit 100 ratings. We’re gonna get there in 2019, but it starts with you. If you have five minutes to spare, please give the show some love. I also have a monthly newsletter where I send ou
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Transcript
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you
00:00:15
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
00:00:38
Speaker
visit goucher.edu forward slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for nonfiction.
Guest Introduction: Debbie Millman
00:00:53
Speaker
Welcome, my CNFing buddy. How are you doing? I'm at Brendan O'Mara, Brendan O'Mara in real life, and this is at CNF Pod, or the Creative Nonfiction Podcast in real life, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. If you want to get better at the form, you've come to the right place. This is our little corner of the internet. If you're here for the first time, which I suspect some of you might be, welcome.
00:01:23
Speaker
Welcome. Crack open a notebook, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and settle in. You're gonna find we do things a little different on this show. Yeah, that's right. How different? Hit it.
00:01:38
Speaker
Where to start, where to start, hmm. My guest is, wait for it, Debbie Millman. Yes, you heard that correctly. Your ears did not deceive you. I didn't bother digging too deep into Debbie's origin story in this interview because there are several podcasts where she dives into that, and I wanted to spare her from repeating herself. Maybe I was too timid in that regard, but I figured I'd steer the ship.
00:02:07
Speaker
towards other things. That said, at this point in the introduction is usually where I riff on what's going on. Maybe offer some insights into how you can improve your work by sharing something I find helpful. But sometimes the most helpful thing is just getting the hell out of the way.
Debbie Millman's Career Journey
00:02:26
Speaker
So, in 17 words, Debbie Millman is a writer, a designer, educator, artist, brand consultant, and host of the podcast Design Matters. But in a single word, Debbie's an inspiration. She made a name for herself as a graphic designer and branding guru after years and years of rejections, failures, and false starts.
00:02:51
Speaker
She's persistent sometimes, she admits to a fault. Her writing is tight and playful, it's deep, meaningful, resonant, and beautiful to look at, as most of her essays are illustrated in her wind-skull way of inking and penciling.
00:03:07
Speaker
As for her career in branding, if you've ever seen a Burger King logo, various Pepsi products, Tropicana, Haagen-Dazs, and Twizzlers, totally twisted, then you've seen her work. If it makes the supermarket look a little prettier,
00:03:22
Speaker
Odds are Debbie had a hand in that. She was president of Sterling brand for 20 years and under her stewardship grew the company from 15 employees to 150. But after a decade of being a Titan in her field from 1995 to 2005, often at the expense of her own creative projects, her own writing, her own drawing, her own painting,
00:03:47
Speaker
She was granted the opportunity to host an internet radio program that, I must add, she had to pay to produce, called Design Matters. This was in 2005, 14 years later, and she's still doing it. And for my money, she, along with Jill Donahue of WAMC Northeast Public Radio, who's been on this show as well,
00:04:13
Speaker
are the best interviewers around. She's interviewed people the likes of Milton Glaser, Malcolm Gladwell, Anne Lamott, Seth Godin, Shepard Fairey, and hundreds more. Design Matters is a testament to her endurance and generosity. It wasn't until she had done the show for several years that it really began to gain that kind of visibility that we've come to associate.
00:04:37
Speaker
her show with now, you know, win awards and become the behemoth that it is today. I could go on and on, and I must apologize for my titanic nerves in this episode. I mean, I suffer from them all the time, but this one was especially bad. For that I'm sorry ahead of time. But getting a chance to speak to Debbie for nearly an hour was such an esteemed honor that I had trouble keeping my you-know-what together.
00:05:02
Speaker
But, uh, first, do you subscribe to Creative Nonfiction Magazine? I sure as hell do. I just renewed and even got a yearly subscription to True Story. That's the monthly pamphlet, which is super kickass. It's the best, Jerry. The best.
00:05:19
Speaker
Naturally, today's podcast is brought to you by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. For nearly 25 years, Creative Nonfiction has been fuel for nonfiction writers and storytellers, publishing a lively blend of exceptional long and short form nonfiction narratives and interviews, as well as columns that examine the craft, style, trends, and ethics of writing true stories. In short, Creative Nonfiction is true stories, well told.
00:05:48
Speaker
Alright, I hope you dig what Debbie and I made for you here. Enjoy.
The Influence of Poetry on Debbie's Life
00:06:01
Speaker
I think a great place to start would be a very inspirational poem for you, The Maximus to Himself by Charles Olsen. After reading that, I loved knowing that it was inspiring to you, and I'd love to get your impressions about why that poem means so much to you. Oh my goodness. I guess if you just take the lines that we are all late in a slow time that we grow up many and this single is not easily known,
00:06:29
Speaker
I mean, I would feel like that was the story of my life. And then the end, you know, it is undone business I speak of this morning with the wind sweeping out from my feet or stretching out with the wind stretching out from my feet. I mean, it's just everything about that poem feels perfect to me. The opening lines, too, I feel as things last, which made for difficulties. Oh, my God. Yes. Doesn't that apply to the to the late bloomer?
00:06:59
Speaker
It applies to everyone. I swear I think that that should, that whole poem should, I think I've just made a decision that that whole poem needs to be on my tombstone. And when did that come across your, your desk, so to speak? Oh my goodness. Uh, I want to say 38 years ago, maybe when I was in college. So I graduated college 35 years ago.
00:07:25
Speaker
So it was sometime during college, I was an English major and poetry was super important to me. So that was one of the first poems that, you know, moved me just intrinsically. And the little meowing you might hear in the background are my cats. They both are big meowers. Oh, that's perfectly fine. This is a pet friendly podcast.
Illustrated Essays and Artistic Critique
00:07:53
Speaker
In reading, saw a lot of your work, having been a fan of your work, and then of course, doing prep for our conversation. I really loved your illustrated essays, self-portrait as your trader specifically, just for the content of the prose, but also for how visually striking they were. And how did you arrive at that as a form
00:08:20
Speaker
For as far back as I can remember, any kind of illustration work or painting work that I was doing had some sort of words embedded in them. I would say I started it about, I don't know, the early 90s. And I was getting ready for a big show that I had won. I won a competition and was preparing for the show and
00:08:49
Speaker
a friend of mine who is and was a much more accomplished painter than I was, didn't think the work was good enough and felt that if I was trying to tell a visual story or a story of paintings with words that both the writing and the painting had to be of equal quality and both had to be excellent. And so I ended up throwing away that whole body of work that I had created
00:09:18
Speaker
for the show at that point and started over with a concentration on really trying to tell a narrative through the work that had more meaning than what I'd been previously doing. And then that just sort of grew. It grew from just writing one sentence or one word on a panel or a canvas.
00:09:40
Speaker
just a series of random words to telling a more concrete story. Did you find that having that it gave you some creative boundaries that helped you hone your focus as a storyteller more? It's a good question. Maybe subconsciously, I don't know that I was consciously looking for boundaries at that point. I think I was looking for
00:10:06
Speaker
more direction than anything else. But I think intrinsically it did set up some boundaries, which gave me a narrower playing field, which I think then allowed me to concentrate on one specific thing. Yeah, so I would say yes. I would say the answer is yes.
00:10:24
Speaker
And I was particularly struck by two of the essays in that collection. And of course we're going to talk about the podcast a bunch too because that's of course how I got familiar with your work as a stepping stone. But with respect to your writing, the post Super Bowl musings or how I learned to stop worrying and love coffee was just so whimsical and playful.
00:10:46
Speaker
How did you approach that essay as the little eight-year-old girl who then grows up to this mature person with really learning how to drink and love coffee and evolve, really? Well, that's a much earlier piece. And in retrospect, I don't know that it really fits with the rest of the work in self-portrait. I think that
00:11:13
Speaker
that particular essay and then also the essay Penelope feel younger. The voice feels younger than the rest of the pieces in there. Mostly I started writing those more whimsical pieces when I was originally doing monologues at the beginning of my podcast. And I was doing that to
00:11:41
Speaker
introduced the podcast in a unique way. And this was really, this was from 2005 to 2009. And so, you know, podcast was, podcasting was a very new discipline. I wasn't in any way anticipating what would happen with the discipline of podcasting in the subsequent years. So I was really just playing a lot and I saw this more as
00:12:08
Speaker
a creative outlet. I sort of was pretending it was a radio show, even though it really was a radio show, it wasn't on the radio, it was on the internet radio. And so then I started the podcast with these essays. Then I started to draw them, but mostly because after the class I took with Milton Glaser in 2005,
00:12:31
Speaker
I started to try to experiment with newer, different, scarier things and had sent a, I sent a query to the acquisitions editor at F&W Media when they had their imprint of books and sent them an example of a visual essay in the hopes that they might commission me to do an entire book of visual essays. And somehow miraculously they did.
00:12:58
Speaker
And at that point, I started to cull through my monologues looking for stories that I felt had a connective tissue almost as a visual memoir. So I had those two other essays that were done probably at the tail end of my even doing monologues for the podcast. In 2009, I stopped doing the monologues because they were taking far too much time and I wanted more time to do the research on my guests. So the show was about my guests, not about me.
00:13:29
Speaker
And so when I finished Look Both Ways, because I felt that my illustrative muscle had grown so much through the process of making that book, I was reluctant to stop making them, but didn't have anything to make them for. And so at that point, Print Magazine, which is also owned by F&W Media, I was working as a contributing writer and editor at that point for the magazine and asked if I could publish
00:13:58
Speaker
a monthly visual essay, mostly in an attempt to keep my muscles moving. I was really afraid that atrophy, if I didn't continue to really work at making these. So those were in a sort of Venn diagram between a whole old body of work and a new body of work, which I felt was more sophisticated and less whimsical, less with that childlike voice.
00:14:27
Speaker
And so while I'm really proud of the visuals of those two pieces in particular, I really do love the visuals. I feel like the voice of both of those is younger.
00:14:38
Speaker
Penelope was one of the ones I have in my notes as well and to me that really strikes to the toxic nature of comparison and jealousy that
Handling Jealousy and Comparison
00:14:46
Speaker
you can feel for a peer whether you're in close proximity to peers or someone if you're following a social feed and you're looking off and comparing yourself to a blow dried version of someone else while you're dealing with your
00:14:58
Speaker
ugly insides. And how did you learn to cultivate a sense of running your own race and try to quell those feelings of jealousy and comparison? Well, a lot of therapy. You know, and also back then when I was experiencing that, that was in 1983 or 1984 and there was no social media. So this was just maybe my own sort of in-person perceptions.
00:15:28
Speaker
I can only imagine for people in their teens and twenties, how much harder that is now when you have so much more to look at and to be projected into. I think the older you get, the easier it is to see through some of those veneers. For the most part, when I feel jealous now or envious,
00:15:52
Speaker
I recognize that what I'm jealous of is something that someone has that I don't think I have. And so are you, you know, jealousy is, is something that you're feeling the lack of, you know, you're comparing yourself to somebody else, but you're not comparing yourself to somebody else with something necessarily that you don't want. If you're jealous, you're, you're projecting something that you do want that they have.
00:16:19
Speaker
And I've done it enough times over the years to then find out that what I was jealous of came with a lot of other destiny that I didn't know about or wouldn't have known about at the time. And you have to be super careful about what you wish for or who you wish you were because you don't know what tragic
00:16:47
Speaker
occurrences or challenges or issues they face that, you know, you just, you just have no way of knowing. And I've had that happen a number of times where I was like, Oh, I wish I was that person. I wish I was that person. And then when I get to know that person better, and I see what they go through to be that person, you know, everybody has their, their demons and their challenges. And so I think the older you get, the more patient with yourself you get about comparing
00:17:17
Speaker
But I also see when I do have those pangs of jealousy, which I do still, I see it as something that I wish for myself. I'm not wishing that that other person didn't have it. I just wish that I could have that ease or that success or that whatever. And so it becomes a little bit easier to bear. And then it challenges me to then try to make that thing that I wish that
00:17:45
Speaker
I was making or to do that thing that I wish that I could do too. And so I try on my best days to use it as motivation to actually make something or do something that I hadn't already.
00:18:00
Speaker
And you've said that anything that's worthwhile takes time and not only time, but a long time. How difficult do you think it is to get people to understand this concept, especially in what you've said is like 140 character culture? Well, now we have 280 characters. I mean, I think it's as difficult as anybody that's listening to it.
00:18:28
Speaker
experience is it. I don't know that preaching is beneficial unless somebody really wants to hear it or is in pain and needs some inspiration or guidance. We live in a day and age where everybody wants Insta, whatever. I think that that makes it very challenging to stick to something if you haven't gotten any kind of an immediate feedback loop.
00:18:57
Speaker
And that is difficult. That's dangerous. Because if you give up just because you haven't gotten the response that you want as fast as you want it, you don't give yourself the opportunity to get better at the thing you want to be known for. And you can only really be known for doing something if it's really good. And I don't know very many people that actually come out of the gate doing something good instantly. It takes a while to get good at something. It takes a while to learn how to talk. It takes a while to learn how to walk.
00:19:26
Speaker
let alone doing something profoundly creative. And in your 20s, you've been very candid about how that decade from when you were probably just graduated from UAlbany into your early 30s was a foundation of a lot of rejection and failure.
00:19:45
Speaker
Um, and you were rejected by a lot of people that you would ultimately work with. So, so like, how did you have the strength of character not to burn those bridges and how are you capable of, uh, not growing better there and then, you know, forging ahead after that?
Overcoming Failure and Pursuing Dreams
00:20:01
Speaker
Well, I thought about this a lot. It's a question I've been getting asked more recently, more frequently. And so I've had to really give it a great deal of thought. And ultimately I think that.
00:20:12
Speaker
I wanted those things more than how big my shame was in pursuing them. So I was willing to be humiliated in the attempt to try to achieve something that meant a great deal to me.
00:20:33
Speaker
I like getting into the self-talk too. What was some of the self-talk you were maybe having, those inner conversations you were having with yourself during that time to keep your nose above the water so you could keep trying to gain that traction that you were so hungry for? I think it was just hope. I think my hope of making it was bigger than my shame in failing at it.
00:20:58
Speaker
Yeah, and you said, too, in a talk I recently said, that I recently watched, that you said, like, I'm not that good, but I'm just unwilling to give up. I have a lot of persistence, and that, I just think, might be genetic. I don't know. I mean, other than the sort of my hope being bigger than my shame, there is a consistency to my life that has an underlying theme of persistence in it. Where do you think that comes from?
00:21:27
Speaker
I think maybe genetics. I tend to do things for, I commit to things and I commit to those things and I stay in those things for good or bad for a long time. It's very hard for me to give up or quit or remove myself from a situation. And sometimes that's amazing. And then sometimes it's not so healthy.
00:21:54
Speaker
So yeah, I've done a podcast for 14 years, but I've also stayed in relationships longer than I should have because I was afraid to be alone or because I didn't think I deserved anything better. So it's all I think a crap sheet in a lot of ways. And for someone who asks so many questions of other people, I wonder what are the types of questions that you ask yourself in times of quiet contemplation?
00:22:26
Speaker
Am I making a difference? Is my life worth something? What do I, what will I leave this, how will I leave this planet? Am I worthy of being alive? I think a lot about how we got here, why we're here.
00:22:46
Speaker
how the universe was created. You know, I spend a lot of time for no real apparent result. You know, I'm not going to come up with the answer, but it doesn't stop me from thinking about the nature of time, the nature of our existence. You know, 13.8 billion years is an inconceivable amount of time.
00:23:11
Speaker
And we're here for what is, I guess, a nanosecond in the grand scheme of space time. And I really do have a deep longing to create a life that is meaningful. And I still think about what that meaning is and how to create that meaning.
00:23:31
Speaker
And so much of that, that meaning is truly stem from the work you've been doing with your podcast for 14 years.
The Beginnings of 'Design Matters' Podcast
00:23:39
Speaker
Uh, so maybe take us back to that day on February 4th, 2005, when you started design matters. What was that moment like? I was super nervous. I was interviewing a very good friend of mine, John Fulbrook. He was then the art director at Simon and Schuster and was, um,
00:23:59
Speaker
really responsible for working on some of the most notable book covers at that time. And I asked John to be on the show because he was extremely talkative. He was really erudite and eloquent. And I felt that if I choked, he could easily take over and have, we can talk about anything because he's that open and that gregarious. And I taped all of his important book covers
00:24:28
Speaker
most notable book covers all over my office, which is where I was doing the show through two telephone handsets. This way I could always have something to refer to on the wall without having to worry about rifling through notes or forgetting what the name of something was. And so I was super, super nervous. And I was seeing somebody at the time who he was he was he was not as nice to me as I probably should have
00:24:59
Speaker
deserved. And I remember John and I were sitting after the show, just debriefing, and I was supposed to meet this person after in the lobby of the Empire State Building, which is where I was working at the time. And I was a few minutes late to meet this person and
00:25:19
Speaker
They got very, very angry with me and we ended up having a big fight right after the first episode. And so it sort of ruined the day. And I remember feeling so serious at the time and so wrought with emotion and drama. And now I look back on it and think, you know, again, one of those situations.
00:25:43
Speaker
what was I doing with that person and why did I stay with that person for so long? And yeah, so it's just all a matter of growth. Going back to the whole jealousy thing, somebody might be thinking, oh my God, she was so on top of it at that moment in time. Like, no, I wasn't. I wasn't at all. I didn't know what I was doing as evidence of the really wretched sound quality.
00:26:06
Speaker
I was nervous as hell. And then after, I had a huge fight with the person I was seeing. But those are things you don't know. Yeah, that's amazing. You even said, for that first episode, you were kind of nervous, even though you were speaking with someone that you knew well and was a good speaker. I'm someone who similarly experiences a great deal of nerves and sort of performance anxiety before I record any of these.
00:26:34
Speaker
Is that something you continually deal with in terms of that? And how do you process that? I don't. You just have to go through it. There's no way to process it. You're not going to be able to process something you feel nervous about before you actually do it. Yeah. Maybe athletes can. I don't know. I'm not an athlete. But what I can tell you is that when I feel nervous, it's mostly a signal to me that it means a great deal to me, that I want it to go well.
00:27:00
Speaker
And I get nervous all the time when I'm doing podcasts with people that I admire. And if I didn't, I think I don't know that I do a good enough job. I mean, part of why I do so much research for all of my episodes and all my interviews is because I care that much that it goes really well. And I feel more confident if I feel like I really know who I'm talking to.
00:27:23
Speaker
But in the process of knowing who I'm talking to, I then am even more cognizant of how amazing they are. So it's all something you have to manage through, but you can't manage out of.
00:27:37
Speaker
And what does the nature of your research look like for any given episode, but maybe especially for someone who has been interviewed tons of times and has a huge body of work? How do you try to make your stamp on that interview a bit different for them and for your listeners?
00:27:58
Speaker
Well, one thing I try to do, I assume that most of the people that are listening to the show might not know who I'm talking to. So I start with that because I have to be able to set the stage for the listener to feel included. You know, I don't want them to not be interested because they've never heard of this person and therefore there's nothing the person could possibly provide or interest the listener with or in.
00:28:25
Speaker
So I try to create an overarching narrative of the person's life. So it's really not about what they've made, but how they've made it, because it's a show that people are listening to as opposed to watching. I can't show visual examples, and I'm much more interested in how a person becomes who they are than necessarily how they make what they make specifically. So I try to create the arc of a life
00:28:56
Speaker
But I also would rather not ask the exact same questions that other people have asked. But if I listen to enough of the podcasts that they've been on, or if I read enough interviews that they've conducted, then what I end up doing, and you'll hear this a lot through the show, you've said X, Y, and Z. And what do you mean by that? Or how come you felt that way? So it's not asking the same questions that other people have already asked.
00:29:23
Speaker
but taking the answers that they've already provided and trying to go deeper. So I'll ask the question by staving their answer and then trying to go deeper. And I also have said this a few times before. So for anybody that's listening to a podcast, forgive me if this is redundant, but one of the things that I equate a good interview with is a game of pool. When you're playing a game of pool, billiards, you are not only trying to get a ball in a hole,
00:29:53
Speaker
you're trying to get the other balls on the table to be in a position where it's easy to get them in the hole after. So you want to leave the ball, you want to leave the table after you get a ball in a hole with the other balls that you need to get in a hole in position. So you can continue to be shooting and win. So for me, I try to create a scenario where I'm not only getting a really interesting answer, but it'll propel the conversation forward.
00:30:23
Speaker
So it's not just question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, it becomes a conversation with a purpose. That is incredibly skillful to deal with. My gears are turning just like, because there is an element of choreography with an element for some freestyle in there. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then if I feel like I've known, if I know as much as possible about that person,
00:30:53
Speaker
wherever that freestyle goes, I can go to. So really, it's my guess that's leading the conversation, but I'm trying to add different places for them to want to go. How did you arrive at that particular style? Over years. I intentionally keep my archive from 2005 to 2009.
00:31:19
Speaker
on iTunes so people can see. I've grown up as a podcaster in public. It's been 14 years. So if I hadn't gotten better, it really would have been quite pathetic. So it's been over years and years and years. And it's funny now to be interviewing, I've all of a sudden been interviewing a couple of people that I haven't interviewed since that first season. People like Paul Sayer.
00:31:45
Speaker
If you listen to the Paul Sayer interview from 2005 and listen to the Paul Sayer interview from 2018, there's a big trajectory there. There's a delta there that's ridiculous and it's embarrassing, but it's also part of life. This is something I've been doing for a really long time and thank God I've gotten better at it. This is proof. If you think I'm good at what I do, thank you very much.
00:32:13
Speaker
But also, look, look at how long it took for me to get. And you can really tell that, you know, year by year, I think I've gotten better. I mean, I looked what is what was interesting for me was that I also interviewed Christophe Nieman and Christophe and Paul were people I interviewed in the first year or two.
00:32:30
Speaker
And so I got transcripts of those first interviews so I could look and see what they said and what I asked. And it was like ridiculous. What was I thinking? I was nowhere near as skilled as I am now at coming up with questions, at developing a narrative. It was just almost like a Proustian questionnaire without any purpose, which I'm not going to really berate myself for that now. I didn't know any better.
00:33:00
Speaker
over the years, even if you don't intend to, I think the more you do something, the better you get. What made you want to stick with the show and keep going with it through those early growing pains? Well, at the time, my doing the show was a bit of an antidote to how I was feeling about my creativity in general.
00:33:25
Speaker
We talked about the early stages of my career. I had a lot of rejection, a lot of failure. And that really continued up through my first working in branding, which I didn't get my first job in branding until 1992 or three. So at that point, I'd already graduated for 10 years. I'd been out of school for 10 years.
00:33:47
Speaker
And that first 10 years, as I always call those years, my decade of rejection and failure.
Balancing Branding and Creative Fulfillment
00:33:53
Speaker
And then I started to work in branding and had a skill, a natural skill for it, a natural ability for the first time in my life became really successful. I was really good at something. And that was such a phenomenal feeling that I had not experienced before.
00:34:16
Speaker
that I stopped doing everything else but that so that I could just be doing that all the time. Like I love cake. That's all I'm going to eat. And after about 10 years of doing that, so from 1995, because I started my job at Sterling at 1995 and that while I was, I was successful at Interbrand prior, I was a very, very tumultuous experience because the company had been acquired.
00:34:42
Speaker
that I was working at had been acquired by Interbrand, and so it was extremely, extremely volatile. So even though I was good at it, it was really challenging. When I got to Sterling, I was still good at what I was doing, and then all of a sudden I was in an environment where I was appreciated. So that, from 1995 to 2005, I built the foundation of my career in branding. But by like 2002, 2003, 2004,
00:35:12
Speaker
I was really beginning to miss the creative freestyle that I'd had before. And at that point started to feel like my creative soul was dying. And then I started writing for Speak Up, Armin Bitt's blog at the time, and that led to
00:35:32
Speaker
my getting this opportunity to work, to create this radio show, which I ended up, I thought they were, when they called me and asked me if I would be interested in hosting a show in Voice America, I thought they were offering me a job. They were just offering me an opportunity. I had to pay them to air the show, to produce and air the show. And at that point, because I was doing really well and I had made some money, I decided, well,
00:35:59
Speaker
Let me try this. It's a creative thing that I can do. I can make it from nothing. And it also does tie into my business world. And so maybe it'll also help with my career and branding, which it really did. And so that's why I did it. But talk about an investment in continuing education with the people that you had access to, right? Well, it gave me tremendous access to the guests. Because there wasn't a million and one
00:36:28
Speaker
interview podcasts, you know, it was a fairly new discipline that people were intrigued by. And so I did get far more yeses than I did get nos. And at that point, because it really was a show focused on designing and designers, I started to get to meet my heroes, which was miraculous.
00:36:51
Speaker
Using kind of a sports analogy here like I kind of went to the to the tape so to speak when I was trying to break down like why it is I think you're Quite possibly the best doing this and I have a really good reason aside from you asking
00:37:05
Speaker
asking the great questions you have a great skill and I basically took out a stopwatch you ask your questions by and large in under 15 seconds every single time and I think that is probably one of the great testaments to you as an interviewer that you you get the good question and then you get out of the way so how did you how did you develop that as your as your style I don't know
00:37:34
Speaker
question but I have no idea. I think just doing it over and over and over again does that does that make sense?
00:37:41
Speaker
I think, of course, yeah. It could just be your taste for sure. Something I've noticed just in listening to tons and tons of podcasts, and I'm proving the point right now is that the host sometimes tends to get a bit too verbose and will go on for 30, 45, 60 seconds. They'll ask a question, then have this giant post-amble explaining the question, but you have this confidence to build up the question, ask it, and then get out of the way. Is that something you've noticed?
00:38:11
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, I'd like to say yes. I hope so. Yeah. And you said, too, that the early years of the show that you had that opening essay component. And why did you choose to abandon that and to take some more of yourself off the stage to showcase your guests? Why did you do that creatively? Because I think that they're way more interesting than I am.
00:38:39
Speaker
absolutely way more interesting than I am. And Seth Godin's podcasting fellowship I think and with that he does with Alexander de Palma he said like what these days a podcast needs to have you know if it's quirky if it it needs to have more of you whatever your quirks are lean into that so in a way like what you're doing by removing that essay from it like this predates a fellowship of course but that was kind of removing maybe an element of personality that
00:39:06
Speaker
of your of your show. Is it like how would you reconcile that and maybe of that putting in leaning in and putting some of that personality in versus you trying to just step back and ultimately showcase the guest? Well, I really do feel that people are coming to the show to listen to who I'm interviewing. They're not coming to listen to my musings.
00:39:31
Speaker
So I think that I'm more interested in having somebody else talk than for me to talk. So that's really what it is. And who are some interviewers that you admire and draw inspiration from to help inform the questions you ask of your guests? Well, I wouldn't say that they're informing the way I ask questions. But I love, I think Terry Gross is amazing.
00:39:58
Speaker
I worshiped Tim Ferriss. I worshiped Tim Ferriss. And I love his ease and his freedom in his conversations. So those are two right off the top of my head. Old school, I really like Barbara Walters. I think she's able to get people to say things that they might not have wanted to say maybe. So those are three right off the top of my head.
00:40:29
Speaker
And you said earlier that you grew up as a podcaster in public and you're 14 years in. So in what ways do you still feel like you're growing up and learning from this craft? Anything can and will happen in a live interview. I am always surprised by how much more there is to learn by
00:41:01
Speaker
meeting or interviewing someone that I maybe don't quite understand. The dynamic, the human dynamic in a conversation is really unlike anything else. Getting to know who someone is going into their world. And when I research someone, I kind of feel like I'm entering into their world and almost
00:41:29
Speaker
Becoming them and seeing the world through their eyes in an effort to really figure out what is important for them to talk about. You know, how am I going to engage them to share who they are? So that is just something I don't know that I'll ever master and humbled by every time I go into my studio and sit down with somebody and graced with the gift of
00:41:58
Speaker
they're revealing who they are in the way that they do. I don't ever take that for granted. In your recent interview with Christoph Niemann, he suggested that a good chunk of his success came from luck, and you immediately pushed back on that. You have trouble with that word, I think is exactly what you said. I really do. I really do. Yeah, can you expand on that?
00:42:23
Speaker
Well, only because luck feels like it's magic and that you have no control in it. And I do think that there's certain things about timing, but if you're not there, present, engaged, when that opportunity arrives, then you're not... I mean, I don't know that it's luck. I think it's hard work and effort and showing up and being present and... I don't know. I feel like luck is too passive a...
00:42:55
Speaker
and attribute. It's like it discounts the effort sometimes, right? Yeah, it does. And it's what happens when opportunity and hard work converge.
00:43:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's a great short interview of Bryan Cranston on YouTube talking about perseverance, persistence, and ultimately he did throw in luck because he was always working on his craft, blah, blah, blah, but he happened to be on an episode of The X-Files that Vince Gilligan
00:43:27
Speaker
Had written and so like 10 years after that Breaking Bad starts and then Gilligan called on Cranston audition for that Titanic role and Lo and behold that like age 50 something Cranston has the role of a lifetime. So absolutely absolutely absolutely and so like it's like it could take that long and that's exactly what I mean and if you want it more than you
00:43:57
Speaker
If you want something more than the effort or the humiliation or the rejection, that becomes your North Star.
Personal Growth and Overcoming Fears
00:44:07
Speaker
This thing that you want to make or contribute or create. Just to be mindful of your time, I'll ask just maybe one more question of you. It just echoes what you just said. What would you say at this point in your career is your North Star?
00:44:28
Speaker
Oh my goodness, Brendan, you're asking me these huge questions. I've only had one cup of coffee. What is my North Star? I guess this is going to sound really trite and super dumb. And most people can be like, oh, please. But it would just be to feel more comfortable in my own skin.
00:45:01
Speaker
So much of what I don't do is dependent on my lack of belief in myself. And I would really like to try to continue to evolve to a place where my fears, while I do believe that my hope is bigger than my fears, my fears still play a big part in making those hopes possible.
00:45:31
Speaker
Have you, how has your relationship to fear changed in the last 20 years or so? Well, it's a, it's a natural human emotion that we, it's very hard to control because it's from the reptilian part of the brain, which is the part of the brain that controls the, the, uh, unconscious, subconscious, whatever, uh, involuntary, that's a better word, involuntary, uh, things that, that happen in our bodies, you know, our,
00:45:58
Speaker
Our reptilian brain controls our heartbeat and our digestion and our metabolism. We don't will those things to happen. And fear is something that we experience when we are facing some sort of uncertainty and our bodies and our brains want to protect us from not knowing what the future might hold.
00:46:19
Speaker
And so anybody that is waiting to get over that fear before they actually make or take a step is sort of waiting in vain because that reptilian brain is really, really strong. And so while I'm better at recognizing that whole phenomena, it still isn't something that I know how to easily overcome.
00:46:47
Speaker
Well, as we were talking about earlier about not peaking in your 20s or 30s or even 40s, I think you've amassed such a wonderful body of work. And I'm so excited for what you'll continually create going forward. So thank you so much for all you do, your generosity of spirit of your time, and all the work you do. And thanks for coming on the show, Debbie. I deeply appreciate it.
00:47:13
Speaker
Brendan, thank you so much and thank you for making such a good podcast. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. Take care and we'll be in touch down the road.
00:47:24
Speaker
Man, I could do 20 pull-ups after hearing her talk. Well, you made it this far, so I must say thanks for listening. I'd do this for you guys so you know that even the best of the best deal with the same bullshit we're all dealing with. If you haven't already, consider subscribing to the show wherever you get your podcasts.
00:47:49
Speaker
Subvert the algorithms across those social media platforms. Subscribe to the show, that way you get it when I publish on every CNF Friday. If you like the show, share it with just one friend. Email them the link or share it on social. Tag me at Brendan O'Mara and at cnfpod so I can toast to your awesomeness.
00:48:10
Speaker
Consider leaving an honest review on iTunes as well. I want to see it hit 100 ratings by the end of 2019. We're going to get there in 2019, but it starts with you. Just you. Just once. If you have five minutes to spare, please give the show some love. I also have a monthly newsletter where I send out my reading recommendations, cool articles, and anything you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
00:48:40
Speaker
Thanks again to our sponsors and Goucher College's NFA Nonfiction as well as Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Go give them some lovin'. I think that's enough. Tune in next week for when we wait for it. Laura Hillenbrand makes her much anticipated debut on the show. I didn't touch my book this week at all, which made me think, if you can't do interview, see ya.