Debbie Millman Quotes

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.

If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now.

The grand scheme of a life, maybe (just maybe), is not about knowing or not knowing, choosing or not choosing. Perhaps what is truly known can’t be described or articulated by creativity or logic, science or art — but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry: As Robert Frost wrote, a poem 'begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.'

I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it.

The great distinction between purgatory and inferno, or hell, is that the people in purgatory know what they have done and the people in hell do not.

He designed the iconic Bob Dylan poster and the I Love New York icon. Milton Glaser

I think market research is extremely valuable when it is used properly. But you must not use it to tell you what to do.

I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it.

Try not to compromise. So many people don’t do what they really want in their hearts because they feel like they’re not good enough, or they’re not smart enough, or they’re not talented enough… anything. And that doesn’t matter. In order for you to live a remarkable life — in order for you to live a life that is fulfilling — you need to be able to go after what you want. And if you don’t, you’re not going to achieve it — ever.

Here’s what the moment of inspiration did. It assembled these cultural meanings in this particular package for this particular group at this particular cultural moment.

The commercial, anthropological, and sociological branding process that professionals engage in now creates visceral distinctions to evoke immediate responses in people.

"There comes a point when you realize that these things, these brands, aren’t "enough." [ . . . ] the search for having more or better or best is a precarious journey into the infinite. [ . . . ] No object, no product, and no brand can provide you with ultimate, infinite satisfaction."

If you can make a compelling argument, and win enough minds, and if you can transform various parts of our world sufficiently, then the moment belongs to you.

Do you consider your work to be good? I consider my work good. I enjoy doing it, which helps a lot. Unfortunately, I get a lot of feedback, constantly, from people who write me about my work. But I know when I’m “giving one from column A, one from column B.” Overall, I think my work is pretty good, but I don’t think it’s great. What do you mean by “giving one from column A and one from column B”? The rule here is there are jobs you do for “god,” and there are jobs you do for money. I try to approach everything as a “god job” — lowercase g. At the beginning of a project, I ask, “What are we going to do, and how are we going to do it? How are we going to make a person fall in love?” And when we start getting questionable feedback about what we’ve done, we have to realize it’s not always possible to do the god job. That’s when I know we just have to get it done and get paid.

if you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be.

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.

But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there — ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions — that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.

Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.

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I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown.

Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown.