Burger King & Star Wars Branding Expert Said NO TO THE CEO JOB! - Debbie Millman

23:49But one of the things that I love about podcasting is learning from all the guests. And you've had so many. So can you tell us a little bit about, not favorites, but the ones that you've really learned from that have kind of changed the way you thought about things? There's so many.

24:06Debbie Millman:Well, one thing that I can say is that no matter how accomplished anybody is, they still are concerned about what they're making next and their longevity and their legacy and their purpose. And that is encouraging in that I think people that listen feel less alone about their own worries because, you know, if an Academy Award director, Academy Award winning director or an Emmy winning writer or producer or Pulitzer Prize winner or McCarthy genius, if they feel insecure, then like I'm just in the world with them. And that feels kind of amazing. um i've i've learned that i've learned how important it is to learn as much as i can about whoever i'm talking with so that they feel respected and not as if i'm just asking the same questions that everybody else does and that's really important to me i i always know that i've done enough when a guest will say, where did you find that?

25:19Debbie Millman:And, you know, I had my ways. Yeah. Yeah. But it's really just research. There's no, there's nothing nefarious there. Yeah. And, and I've learned how important it is to do things despite feeling uncomfortable or insecure. And I've learned that confidence doesn't show up. It's just something that you build over time after the successful repetition of any endeavor. That's how you build confidence. It doesn't, you can't wait for it to show up. I'll do it when I feel more confident. Well, then you'll wait forever. But if you do it, if you try to do it and continue to do it, you will get better. And that's when confidence is built.

26:06Debbie Millman:Pete, what do you got?

26:08Peter Clarke:well, nothing now based on the criteria of having a question that, you know, it's such a deep cut that you're like, where did you find that? But I was actually going to, there's probably a podcast where you talk about this, but going back to just the sort of switch to Interbrand, the discovery of sort of the nascent talent that, you know, what I'm always fascinated by people's sort of decision process. And as they walk the path of their career, but what was it that, how'd you end up going to Interbrand, I guess, what was the connection to sort of say, Oh, let me go.

26:37Debbie Millman:Another cold call. Literally another cold call. I was sitting at a job that I was miserable in and got a call from a headhunter. It was like, oh, I have this job. And when I told him my backbite, he's like, oh, I don't know if you'd be the right fit, but let's see. Let me pass your resume to them, but don't get your hopes up. And then he called back and he's like, oh, they'd like to meet you. And then they met me and then they liked me and hired me. And I remember skipping down the street after the interview. I'm going to be a vice president. I'm going to be a

27:06Peter Clarke:vice president career was born oh man fantastic did you ever did you ever ask him to that point if your resume wasn't right or whatever and then you know did you ever ask what it was they saw

27:17Debbie Millman:initially to want to have a conversation no i think i think that they probably saw how eager i was to to leave the job i was in no i don't i would never have done that i wouldn't have wanted to burn any bridges, but I think that they probably saw an exuberance about the topic because I was really excited about, I mean, these were brands that they had, that they were working on that I sold in my dad's store. And so I think that my genuine passion for branding, which I didn't even know existed, was revealed in that moment to all of us. And I think that's my guess would be that's what they saw. Yeah.

28:02Yeah. So we have a bunch of leaders, founder. We have a huge HR community that follows us, but we have designers and product managers that listen as well. What is your advice to folks? Is it to find that something that you're eager and passionate about? When you give career advice to the students at SBA and the master's program, what are you talking to them about that is going to help set them off on a different charter than perhaps before?

28:32Debbie Millman:Well, we do a lot of work to identify what their core benefits are. So, you know, people looking for jobs often forget how important it is to be able to provide something that is unique to the environment that they're going into in exchange for the money they're going to get. You know, it's not just about work-life balance at a paycheck. It's about, well, what are you giving to the environment that you're going into? How can you express that beyond I'm a people person or I'm good with type? You know, show me a grid anytime and I'm down. It's way more than that. And so we do extensive work to really understand what are their key attributes?

29:17Debbie Millman:What is the unique benefit that they can provide? And what is the mission that they can share when somebody asks, well, why should I hire you? And we do a lot of work in that regard. Yeah, that's not something that comes naturally to people. I was just watching Reese Witherspoon on like a TikTok the other day. Some woman had called her for career advice and she had asked the woman, well, what are your superpowers? What are your strengths? And the woman couldn't list them. Exactly. Why is that? So I always, because people don't spend the time really thinking about what it is that they can provide.

29:54Debbie Millman:And oftentimes they're thinking about what can I get? And I think in job search, that is a really important thing to consider, obviously. But there is an exchange. There needs to be a return on an investment. And I express that to students, especially creative students. They need to understand the language of finance, branding students especially. They need to understand what is the value proposition here? What can I provide that nobody else can in order to be competitive? You don't get a job, really. You don't go to a supermarket and pick up a job next to the oatmeal. You actually win a job in competition with everybody else.

30:30Debbie Millman:And so what are you doing that is going to best your competition? And thinking that way changes things for them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, Pete and I talk to people about their careers all the day. And I don't know, Pete, I'm sure you see the same thing. yeah but i think yeah it's a lot of the like we just don't take the time to necessarily inventory

30:49Peter Clarke:or also often feel they are unique in that or it's a skill set that is different than someone else right i think we have a tendency i mean there's definitely a percentage of people that have no problem you know confidently expressing their superpowers and then there's 95 of the rest of the world who's like i don't is it a strength right like can i really call it a strength i think we sell ourselves short frequently, right? And I think that's more of a just getting people to really step back and say, what is it that I do well, right? And, you know, can confidently talk about it. I mean, that's a great question that gets asked in interviews too.

31:26Peter Clarke:Like, you know, what would your peers say about you? I don't know. I've never actually stopped to figure out what they might say, you know. I hope they say that.

31:35Debbie Millman:I do a lot of mock interviews with my students in my undergrads to really give them a little bit more of an understanding about what it feels like to be asked those questions and what are the potential best answers that they can provide. Yeah, that's helpful. I don't know, our conversation is so lovely and I don't want, you know, we're running out of time, but I wanted you to talk about the thing that you were mentioning to Pete and I earlier that you're very excited about that you and Roxanne are working on together. And we haven't talked about Roxanne, but you can tell people who she is and tell us what you two are excited about right now.

32:15Debbie Millman:Absolutely. Well, Roxanne Gay is my wife. We've been married for almost six years. And last year we acquired The Rumpus, which is an online literary magazine. And that's where one of the places she got her start as a writer, as did Sherald Strayed. That's where Dear Sugar began. Isaac Fitzgerald, some really wonderful, wonderful writers got their starts there. And she was approached by the then owner last year about the potential of her acquiring it. And it was a dream of mine to do something like this. And she was originally not interested, but I was like, oh, I am, I am, I am. And so we acquired it and we spent the last, I don't know, eight months or so redesigning it.

33:01Debbie Millman:So the redesign is now live. One of my former students who graduated quite a long time ago, Santiago Kereski, I think he graduated like 12 years ago or something. I commissioned him to work on the redesign with us. We work with WordPress and it is truly beautiful. It's right now still a literary magazine, but we're going to be expanding it and I'm going to head up the expansion into arts and culture. So watch this space, the rumpus.net. The rumpus.net. That is so exciting. And you're getting, you know, I'm guessing a lot of this is digital, but you're getting to do magazine covers. Just like your book reports with JFK.

33:41Debbie Millman:I know. I know. I know. It's so interesting. Life is very, right now, my life feels very symmetrical in that regard. Yeah. And I bet it is beautiful. That's how fulfilling. But, okay, so that you're excited about. I think you two also love, when this is your latest book, but you both love gardening. I love gardening. Roxanne loves to taste the things that I make. Okay, so she cooks. She does it. So in my research, I thought you both were like in the garden, but I did read that she cooks, but she doesn't help you in the garden. No, not really. She just enjoys it.

34:18Peter Clarke:Good. Vertically integrated, you know.

34:19Debbie Millman:Yeah, absolutely. And I guess, you know, she's in it in that, you know, she enjoys it and we sit out in the garden a lot together. but I started gardening during COVID. I mean, I've always been a wannabe gardener. It's just hard to be a wannabe gardener in New York City because it's New York City. But I've often had spaces since the early 90s. I always had a little outdoor space. That was always something that I sought, even compromised on location and size of space to accommodate having a little bit of an outdoor space and always tried to have like balcony gardens or container gardens. And they were always really rough and not particularly successful.

35:04Debbie Millman:But that was in New York. During COVID, Roxanne and I now go back and forth between New York and LA because though I'm a native New Yorker, she had a place in Los Angeles that she didn't want to give up. And so we now commute back and forth to both. And during COVID, I was there and had a lot of time on my hands and the weather was beautiful and I wanted to be outdoors as much as possible. And so I started more successful gardening, although it took a while. It took a while. I've become better at it. I am by no means an expert or even in the same stratosphere, in the same universe as somebody like Martha Stewart or anybody like that.

35:39Debbie Millman:And so... Well, none of us are. I just do it for joy. I just do it for joy. Yeah. And then... But your favorite thing to grow.

35:46Peter Clarke:Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go.

35:48Debbie Millman:Tomatoes. Tomatoes, they're easy and they're plentiful and they're delicious. They are delicious. And there's so many varieties. Yeah. Yeah. There's like, I don't even know how many varieties of tomatoes, but there's a lot. What's your favorite tomato? Heirloom. Any kind of heirloom tomato. Love. Yeah. Cherry tomatoes also serve basic, but very poppable. And my cousin actually dehydrates them. And then, so then they're dried tomatoes and oh my God, it's like candy. Yeah. Sun-dried tomatoes are so good. I've learned almost everything about gardening from my cousin Eileen. Okay, good job. And I write about her in the book.

36:22Yeah. Well, tell us about the book because what was the inspiration behind it? And what is it about gardening that's good for the soul?

36:30Debbie Millman:Well, in as much as you might try, you can't control Mother Nature. So any garden that you begin and cultivate and grow is very much out of your control. And so you have to give that up. You have to give up any notion of control. and really collaborate and cooperate with Mother Nature. And that is really incredible to do. Watching things grow is amazing. Taking care of plants and trees and shrubs, fruits, it's just an extraordinary privilege. I think that being able to grow your own sustenance is also just an utter joy and again, another privilege. Everything is much slower. I love getting dirty.

37:21Debbie Millman:I love being outside. I love the feeling of the sun on my back. I love when my dog is nearby and playing in the dirt, in the soil. It's a real gift. The book came quite by accident. I have written, all my books have been about design and branding for the most part. And I got I got an email out of the blue from a publisher at Timber Press, which is part of Hachet. They had seen my documentation of my efforts on Instagram. And I had done some interest for TED when it was online that year about my love letter to gardening. And they were interested in knowing if I'd want to write a book. And I was like, I'm not an expert, so no.

38:04Debbie Millman:But if you want me to do something about my quest, then that would be something I'd love to do. And that's how it happened. And beautiful. And it's a beautiful book. And I think you have seven books, if I'm remembering correctly. I think it's eight. Eight. Eight. Okay. Sorry. I thought it was seven. That's okay. But maybe it wasn't the gardening one that wasn't in there. Do you like writing better or design better? Or do you love them both? I love them in conversation with each other. I love doing both. it's very much an art form that they engage in at the same time that was part of the issue in creating love letter for a garden to a garden my book because my editor incredible woman named mckenna goodman she wanted the manuscript first and i was like no i don't know how to do that like this is this is something that i i write and draw at the same time and then play until i feel like the story has taken its next step.

39:05Debbie Millman:And so for a while I was really stuck because I was sitting in front of, you know, my computer with like three sentences, which were the same three sentences that started the TED interstitial. So they weren't even new. And I didn't know where to go because I couldn't draw and write at the same time. And so then finally McKenna was like, well, why don't you give me a chapter? Give me the first chapter. And so I did. And then she approve that and that's how we built the book. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine that they go together and they fuel each other. For me, they do. Yeah. Yeah. I draw words. So that's also how it works.

39:43Yeah. I bet your handwriting's beautiful. I'd like to think so. My handwriting's terrible. It's a superpower. Yeah. It's a superpower. It's my superpower. And it keeps getting worse because I don't do it very often, right? Because it's all, you know, on your phone or laptop or whatever. Pete, I'm going to give you the last question. So you better make it good.

40:04Peter Clarke:Well, all right. Oh, pressure. No pressure. Well, I was going to shift to sort of, you know, as we sort of live in the world of technology, Jessica and I, of course, most everything turns to the topic of AI these days. And just thinking back to school, as you're talking to students, I mean, what do you think or how are you talking about the impact of AI, AI tools around just the design industry itself? And sort of, we seem to have this narrative that says AI will do everything better than humans, but I'm just curious, you've got a bunch of students thinking about what am I going to go do and how will this impact me in the future?

40:43Peter Clarke:What are those conversations like?

40:44Debbie Millman:Well, I have an advantage in that I've lived through two technological leaps in my lifetime. The first in the 80s with the introduction of the personal computer and the migration of design work being done from a drafting table to a computer. And at that time, everybody was talking about how we were going to lose all our jobs and computers were going to do all the work of a designer. There were some jobs that were lost, but there were hundreds of thousands of jobs that were created. And so there was a transition, but I don't know that anything was really lost. I think craft is something that is always required within any tool that you're using.

41:39Debbie Millman:And for those that prefer to work with their hands, you still can. Then in the late 1990s, we had the big move to the internet and everybody's business was going to go out of business because it was all going to... Now, Amazon is challenging that. Of course, they do and have put a big dent into the retail business. But again, hundreds of thousands of other jobs were created and opportunities that we never would have even imagined. So this is the third time now I'm hearing about the chance that the entire workforce, as we know it, will be obliterated. Similar to what I was saying before about being afraid to leave my job because I didn't know what was going to come because I could only think of what I was losing as opposed to what I might gain since I haven't gained it yet.

42:26Debbie Millman:I think it's a little bit hard for us to see that far into the future. However, it's a big however, like bold, underlined, however, uppercase. I think that we have to expect that there needs to be a certain level of responsibility in how we engage with AI. I was thinking there should be like there is a drinking age. There should be an AI age. I'm not joking because I think you need to be able to really understand what you're doing. It's a technological lubricant in the same way that alcohol is a social lubricant, but it's not the answer to every question. It can help with providing some stimulus.

43:11Debbie Millman:But for people that are educated, for people that have a certain foundation of an understanding of the world, it could be enormously helpful as a research tool, as a co-writer, etc. But for students who are learning through curiosity, that is what I'm petrified by because I'm already seeing the demise of the student brain. And I know faculty that are assigning creative writing and getting back AI writing. Of course. That's not creative writing. That's not creative writing. Why bother taking a creative writing class if you're just going to get a machine to write something for you? That's not original thinking.

43:53Debbie Millman:And so in as much as I think a lot of you are worried about jobs, I'm worried about brains and the younger brains that aren't formed yet. We wouldn't allow a 10-year-old to drink. We shouldn't let them use AI to learn. Yeah, it's so interesting. I have a six-year-old. And so I was reading an article yesterday. Vinod Khosla was kind of saying like, you know, AI and by I think 2035, he said, will wipe out 80 percent of jobs. And like a five-year-old now won't even have to look for a job when they're older. And, you know. I'm really surprised you said that. I really liked the nude. I'm surprised.

44:32Yeah. I mean, it's scary. It is scary. I don't want that to be true. No, I don't either. He's a big thinker. It doesn't mean he's right. But it is having a child and going through a learning expedition journey in his life. Like, I don't want him to learn through AI. No.

44:52Debbie Millman:I think imagination and curiosity are what make us human. We're the only species that can scenario plan, that can think about the future in the way that we do and can create things the way that we create. And why give that up? Why compromise that? Why dilute that? So I think we're at the very beginnings. And maybe we won't have to worry so much. I don't know. We certainly don't have to worry the way we did about design and technology and the internet and technology, but we'll see. Yeah. Well, we always ask our guests to leave our listeners with a little advice, some inspiration. So no pressure to put on you, but what do you want to leave our listeners with today?

45:38Debbie Millman:Well, something that I've been thinking about a lot as I am now in my 60s and thinking about what I want to do with the rest of my life is a question I seem to be asking myself every day, which is, if not now, when? And so if you have something that you've been hoping to start or hoping to finish or just make a bigger part of your life, I think that's a really important question. If not now, when? When? When? Yeah. When, guys? Listen. Debbie knows. Before the robots. Yeah. Do it before the robots can do it. Yeah. Debbie, if our folks want to find out about you, where should they go to find out about you?

46:23I know you have your website, but is that where they should go?

46:26Debbie Millman:Yeah, debbiemellman.com is my website. That can connect you to the entire archive of Design Matters. If you just want to go there first, it's designmattersmedia.com. and Debbie Millman on Instagram and all the socials. And then you can buy her books where all books are sold and you should get them because they're wonderful. Debbie, thank you so much for being on the show. And thank you for all that you've done in the world and for women too. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Jessica. Thanks, Pete. Thanks for listening to TruthWorks.