Creating Your Ideal Life And Career, with Debbie Millman

(object hisses) (pen clicks) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (tranquil music) Hi, I'm Debbie Millman, welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Monday morning. I'm your guest host for the week, and I just wanna say I'm so excited to be here. For those of you who might not know me, I'm a designer, a writer, an educator, a brand consultant, and host of one of the world's first podcasts, "Design Matters." I am endlessly fascinated by how we can work to create better careers and lives for ourselves. This week, I'd like to talk to you about how to design a life and a career that is fulfilling, interesting and takes advantage of all of your natural talents. I'll cover things like how to uncover your interests, navigate a career, and deal with rejection. Today we're going to start with the basics, and I'll break down how I understand my career and what I've learned over the years, and I'd like to give you a few ideas and how you might wanna think about yours. I think the essentials to having a meaningful and fulfilling career, first and foremost is about understanding what matters to you most. And oftentimes there might be several things that matter to you. As you're building your career, it makes sense to take one step at a time and try and fulfill what I call one non-negotiable at a time. And the non-negotiables are the things that really help you decide what your priorities are. Everything that we do is a constant balance of moving forward and taking risk as we're doing that, the more you can move forward, understanding that there is an uncertainty to the path that you're on, the more likely you are able to live with that uncertainty. A lot of people often keep themselves from that feeling, thinking that it's too scary to live in that uncertainty, but honestly, frankly, moving into that uncertainty is really the only thing that's going to allow you to create something that you haven't created before. One of the hardest decisions that I've made in my life was transitioning out of a full-time leadership position in a corporation. I had planned for quite a long time, for about five or six years that I was going to leave and do more creative work. Well, that five year mark came and went, and I was still doing the things that I had already been doing. So much so that I remember talking to my brother about the fact that I was ultimately planning on leaving, and he said, "Oh, Debbie, you've been saying that for years. I don't think you're ever going to leave." And I didn't really wanna hear that from him, but as a sibling can often do, he was telling me the truth. And so I really had to take a hard look at what I was telling myself and make a decision. It was the hardest decision I think I've ever made in...