The Marginalian
The Marginalian

What It Takes to Design a Good Life

What does it take to have a good life? That’s what Jonathan Fields, author of Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, wondered when his daughter turned five and he grew tired of reading her fables about the knight who saves the princess to live happily ever after. So he set out to find more empowering stories of existential success from some of the most inspiring women and men of our time, and The Good Life Project was born — a wonderful conversation series, which also gave us Milton Glaser on art, technology, and the secret of life. In this remarkably wide-ranging and soul-stimulating episode, Fields turns the tables on master-interviewer Debbie Millman, host of the National Design Award winning radio show Design Matters and author of, most recently, Self-Portrait as Your Traitor. Together, they explore the question of what makes it possible to design your life — to design a good life. Highlights below.

On the shared humanity of the “impostor syndrome” most creative people feel and what years of interviewing great minds have revealed about the life-cycle of happiness:

The one common denominator [that great thinkers and creators] have shared with me over the years is that they all feel like they have to get up every day and do it again. They all feel like they may very well be discovered as phonies, they very well may never, ever achieve what they had hoped. The only two people in all the years that I’ve done this that have been different, that have had a different experience in articulating who they are and what they believe, are Milton Glaser and Massimo Vignelli. But I think the common denominator that they share is that they’re both in their eighties!

On our culture of entitled impatience and why we should “expect anything worthwhile to take a long time”:

I was doing a lecture for a group of students several months ago and I was talking about how long things can take… And a young woman raised her hand at the end of the lecture… and asked for some advice, because she had started a blog and she was hoping to get some pointers on how to get people to come to the blog, to read the blog, because she was feeling very discouraged — she’d been doing it for a while and people weren’t reading it. She wasn’t getting any traction. And so, of course, my first question was “How long have you been doing it?” And very sincerely, very earnestly, she said, “Six weeks.”

[…]

And this is, I think, a really unfortunate ramification from this 140-character culture — that people in their twenties, when they graduate from college, expect that they have to be successful. And if they’re not successful right out of the gate, then there’s something wrong with them. And then that builds into this real sense of hopelessness, because they haven’t achieved something quickly.

On synthesizing our own happiness and making our own luck, and the importance of mental health care:

This is where we run into trouble in terms of being fulfilled… You have to make your own happiness, wherever you are. Your job isn’t going to make you happy, your spouse isn’t going to make you happy, the weather isn’t going to make you happy… You have to decide what you want, and you have to find that way of doing it, whether or not the outside circumstances are going to participate in your success… You have to be able to create your own happiness, period. And if you can’t, then you need to find a good shrink who can help you figure out what it’s going to take.

On finding a sense of purpose:

What I think has helped propel me to live a more purposeful life [is] to feel that what I’m doing is coming from my heart and not my head so much. And it’s still a struggle.

On how our actions, not our words, reveal our true priorities:

I’m a big proponent of “busy is a decision.” You decide what you want to do and the things that are important to you. And you don’t find the time to do things — you make the time to do things. And if you aren’t doing them because you’re “too busy,” it’s likely not as much of a priority as what you’re actually doing.

On what it means and what it takes to have a good life, adapted from Millman’s remarkable commencement address:

Imagine immensities. Pick yourself up from rejection and plow ahead. Don’t compromise.

Start now.

Start now, every single day.

The entire conversation is well worth watching, as is subscribing to both The Good Life Project and Design Matters (also on SoundCloud). Complement with Millman’s heartening commencement address on courage and the creative life and her illustrated poems and essays.


Published April 29, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/29/debbie-millman-good-life-project/

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