How to Know What You Want in Life and Career, with Debbie Millman

(soft music) Headspace Studio. (soft music) Hi, everyone. I'm Debbie Millman, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace, end to Tuesday. If you listen yesterday, then you know that this week is all about being intentional about creating a career and a life that we love. But before we can do what we love, we have to know what we love and what we really want. Today, we'll discuss different ways to determine what we want out of life and how that can help focus our career. (soft music) So when I graduated college, I hadn't even known about what it meant to do an internship before you graduate. My only jobs when I was studying in school were working at a pizza joint, making pizza pies. And so when I graduated, I really only knew one thing, and that was I wanted to live in Manhattan. My dad lived in Manhattan for a couple of years as I was growing up. I'm a native New Yorker, and this felt like the perfect place to sort of make my life. But I also knew that I wanted to live a creative life, and I suspected that I couldn't do both. And this is really where I, in many ways compromised on what I was considering possible for myself. And I moved to Manhattan and I could have become a waitress or a bartender or any number of other types of service jobs, but I was afraid that if I did that, my pain might become quite unpredictable, and therefore, it might be very, very challenging to sustain a life in Manhattan. And so I became a commercial artist. I pursued a career as a designer and a commercial artist as opposed to one that was all about fine art. And for decades, I was sure that I had compromised on what I wanted because I was doing commercial work as opposed to more fine art and creative work. But what I realized many years later was that I didn't really compromise on the most important thing that I wanted at that time, which was to live in Manhattan. And so for me, it was about being able to make enough money to be as self-sufficient as I could be, as safe and secure as I could be at that time. And it was only decades later that I felt that I could manifest a couple of the other things on my list. As we are navigating the path of our careers and our futures, oftentimes, we are afraid of doing something as we've talked about, because we are unsure about the outcome. The most important step in moving into a future that you want to have is the courage to make it happen. Courage is so much more important than confidence. Dani Shapiro, the writer told me after an episode of Design Matters, that she felt that confidence was overrated. And it really startled me because it suddenly...