“Our abilities are limited only by our perceptions.”
—Debbie Millman

I discovered Debbie Millman by listening to a conversation with her and Tim Ferris on the Tim Ferris Show. It was hard not to fall in love with her! On the podcast, titled My healing journey after childhood abuse, Tim records himself talking with his dear friend Debbie about his sexual abuse history. He’s not even sure he will air the recording at the time they are creating it. Debbie is highly empathic, and she is also courageous and generous in the sharing of her own history of sexual abuse. I was greatly inspired by the voluminous healing work that Debbie had undertaken in her life.

Curious about who she is, I listened to a second Tim Ferris podcast — and one of his most popular shows — in which Debbie is the subject. It turns out that Debbie Millman is an icon in the design world, a fabulously successful writer, educator and artist who hosts the notable podcast, Design Matters.

While I listened to Debbie talk about the highs and lows of her career — and she was humble and honest about her so-called failures (they often led to wins) — I was fixated upon the fact that part of the time in which she built her empire, she was in therapy multiple days a week, muscling through a decades-long recovery journey.

Given both her outrageous success as an artist and businesswoman and perseverance in working through tortuous emotional experiences, I listened carefully to her description of the five-to-ten-year plan she calls “the Remarkable Life” exercise. The exercise was given to her initially by one of her mentors, and she did it with astonishing results. “I created this essay with these long-range, far fetched goals that I can tell you now —12 years later — have almost all come true,” she says to Tim. 

The idea is to write a paragraph-style description of a day in your life five or ten years from now in great detail and without fear of failure — including what you will be doing on an hourly basis, who you will be with, where you will be living, what you will wear etc,. from the moment you wake until you go to sleep.

“Put your whole heart into it, and write like there’s no tomorrow. Write like your life depends on it, because it does. And then read it once a year, and see what happens. It’s magic!”  Debbie says she’s been assigning this project to her undergrad and masters students for years, and she hears back from a large number of them to report how incredibly accurate the writing turned out to be for their lives.

Debbie recommends writing long for best results. Her narrative was around 10, five-by-seven pages, in large handwriting. She then made a list of everything she wanted to come true. “The more care you put into it, likely the more success you’ll have coming out of it.”

I am reminded again of the huge power invested in us through our writing: our capacity to heal both backward and forward in our personal histories.

You can listen to the full podcast here.

Photo courtesy of Laura Chouette, Unsplash