The two great tasks of the creative life are keeping failure from breaking the spirit and keeping success from ossifying it. If you do attain success by the weft and warp of hard work and luck, it takes great courage to resist becoming a template of yourself that replicates whatever has garnered you acclaim in the past, continually lowering and lowering your willingness to take risks, narrowing and narrowing your locus of curiosity — that elemental building block of creativity.

In 2005, while working as a designer at a branding agency, Debbie Millman — my onetime partner, now closest friend — rented a microphone and a room in an office building and sat down, excited and nervous and overprepared, to conduct her first interview. She had never interviewed anyone before. The word “podcast” did not yet exist. She had to pay a commercial internet radio service to air her tiny labor of love, which she called Design Matters.

It began as an inquiry into how her design heroes came to be who they are. But in a living testament to Bertrand Russell’s abiding insight that the key to a fulfilling life as you grow older is to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” over the years the interviews rippled beyond design to draw out the inner lives of musicians and poets, philosophers and physicists, and a panoply of artists across every discipline. These conversations would widen and widen to become one great investigation of what it takes to design a creative life, a life of substance and significance that touches other lives in a meaningful way.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Design Matters — the best of which is collected in this excellent book — I decided to revisit my favorite interviews from the entire archive and apply to them my bird divination process, reading over the hundreds of pages of transcripts, taking down words and phrases that called out to my imagination as particularly original or beautiful or plainly true, and rearranging them into a kind of lyric, or perhaps divination, that captures the spirit of the show and the overarching philosophy for living emanating from it.

I used twenty voices from the twenty years — nineteen interview subjects (Suleika Jaouad, David Spergel, Rosanne Cash, Jacqueline Woodson, Alison Bechdel, Roxane Gay, Joan As Police Woman, Indigo Girls, Susan Cain, Esther Perel, Alain de Botton, Sophie Blackall, Jad Abumrad, Krista Tippett, Seth Godin, Toshi Reagon, Tim Ferriss, Elizabeth Alexander) and Debbie herself. Each line comes from a different person, sometimes two in a single line. The final stanza, beginning with Debbie’s signature “And remember…” that closes every podcast episode, is composed entirely of her own words and phrases spoken in these nineteen interviews.

Here is the fruit of this strange, wildly time-consuming, and utterly joyful labor:

TWENTY WAYS TO MATTER

Excavate the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth —
the deeper you go, the simpler it gets:
the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss —
all of it part of the same fabric,
all just a story
emerging from the quantum foam.

Move through the world
knowing that everyone around you
is doing the best they can,
that humanity is capable
of the Moonlight Sonata
and the concentration camp,
that you are a piece
of the same puzzle.

If you are longing for
the world to be more perfect
do something about it:
become a kind of translator
between reality and possibility,
cast a light on a parallel world,
that little speck in the distance —
it is the hope, it is the struggle, it is the reward.

Let go of the future
but hold on to the beautiful things
that, like music, exist outside of time —
the sense of wonder and love and light.

When the chord changes on you
what if you harmonized it?

The black hole of your devastation
is a wild strange expansive place.
We are really good at coming up
with reasons to not go there.
Go there.
You will find the seeds
that become galaxies of growth.
You will find
what the soul and the spirit and the heart
need to know.

Be on the inside of your heart,
make a home inside yourself,
for to keep other people happy
is distraction from the real work of being
in which there is no final test
for how to be human —
only the open question
of how to be yourself
which you must answer daily
with all the strength and kindness
that you’ve got.

And remember
that life is an extraordinary creative collaboration,
that if we keep shining a light
on the things that mean and matter the most
the light overcomes the darkness,
that love is the oldest light in the universe
and when you live and work and listen
with open-hearted love
everything
     everything
          everything
is possible
for your life.