How to Silence the Haters - Grace Bonney | Inside Quest #75

[Music] everybody welcome to inside plus our goal is to take you inside the mind of the world's most effective thinkers so that you guys can learn with ease what they usually learn with great difficulty and I promise if you pay attention our guests will teach you to acquire the behaviors and thought patterns that you're going to need to be successful no matter what you're trying to accomplish in your life today's guest is a seriously Oh G blogger who was blogging before blogging was a thing and she has woven herself into the very fabric of the design and DIY communities through her prolific writing she's been a contributing editor or freelancer for a litany of some of the most recognizable names in the industry including House & Garden InStyle and New York Magazine and her website Oh her website design sponge which has been going for over a decade at this point was dubbed the Martha Stewart Living for Millennials by the New York Times she's awesome man because she really reaches beyond the surface aesthetic and finds the deeper meaning and human connection behind the design and this remarkably personal approach has made her unbelievably successful she's built the design sponge social ecosystem into a vibrant and thriving community that reaches over 1.5 million people per day that is insane and with a relatively small team she's having a massive impact on the world of design and she's doing it by focusing on spreading her company's values as well as simply making the world a more beautiful place she inspires me because she is constantly learning and reinventing herself and that broad experience gives her collective works a seriously unique vitality some of her eclectic highlights include working as a style editor doing her own podcast writing multiple books and publishing a newspaper she is a force of nature truly guys who is fearless we herself and this trait coupled with her authentic approachable demeanor has seen her featured everywhere and Good Morning America to the Martha Stewart Show so please please help me in welcoming the author of in the company of women inspiration and advice from over 100 makers artists and entrepreneurs the founder of the glorious juggernaut design sponge grace Bonnie [Music] absolutely thank you so much for joining me you even in in all the words in the world I don't think I could really capture the eclectic person that you are and that's something that really I think has fed your community and is where I want to start so I'm going to try to get us there so bear with me I was talking about this off-camera when you're researching somebody you really get to see a compressed evolution of that person and it's been fascinating to watch you go from the early days as a startup blogger to where you are now and the moment that I found most interesting was your openness and handling being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and it was in that moment in the way that you responded to the difficulty of changing identity and changes something you talked really powerfully about all through your career and it's fun to watch that change but talk to me about how do you deal with a changing identity it's really difficult and I don't think there is one correct way to do it I think I'm always course-correcting and what feels like the appropriate way to deal with something difficult or even something great just a large change and I think when I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes it it really kind of felt like a slamming door like here's the end of the grace you knew before and I'm going to have to shove this new door open and figure out what this new version of life is like and and I wasn't very good at it at first I really really stumbled I had three months of just like crying on the floor and trying to figure out how I pick up and move on and what would this mean for my life going forward did it have long-term health complications how do I correct that can I correct that it was really scary but then I thought about it the way I thought about every other challenge I've had at work which was you just have to let yourself sit in the muck and just be in it because there is no way to push yourself out of it you kind of just have to let yourself go through all the stages of grief and difficulty and then just slowly let yourself come out of it and when I did I felt calmer and I felt stronger and I still wish I didn't have type 1 but it's it's a challenge that weirdly feels familiar to me because with type 1 there's never a set way of doing things that will always work forever you're always adjusting whether it's insulin levels or the doctors you have to see or and all of these different things it's constantly changing and we were talking about before the internet is constantly changing and so I learned from work that there's just no place where you can sit still and be you know peace out I'm done I can just have the same thing forever it's cool that doesn't exist so when I kind of made that connection between the lessons I learned in business and what I would learn from a health challenge like this it kind of clicked and made sense yeah I loved watching the themes like in you're writing a blog that's gone on as long as yours is like a time capsule or a diary almost especially because you're so real and authentic and watching you talk about change from the perspective of a business woman who's just in the throes of unimaginable success I mean really for anybody that hasn't touched her ecosystem before it is massive I mean massive massive massive and you see the numbers on Pinterest Instagram Twitter Facebook the website itself it really is astonishing so you you see that version of what change looks like from a position of well-earned confidence and then all the way to being able to admit that you know I'm going to take a few months some of them before and cry for it you know but then and then you walk your readers through the process of picking yourself back up if you would tell what is that like when you're on the floor crying part of you must know I'm going to work my way to standing up again what is that mental process for you um I think so much of it is rooted in the idea of taking the time you need to fully process something I think living online and especially I'm not of the generation of bloggers who came into their blogs fully formed as a brand I came into it thinking this will be a great way to get another job in a more stable industry some point like somebody's a yeah and then I went to those and then they all closed and at first I thought it was my fault I'm going to realize it was just the industry but when you when you realize the thing that you thought would be your stable point changes you just look at things a little bit differently but I think in general sort of learning to change identity than learning to embrace something that's new it's just very much about being calm and being quiet and the Internet has taught me to talk a lot but I think challenges like this teach me to be quiet even more and in those quiet so you can hear an inner voice or it's hear an inner voice is hear other people's voices of experienced people who've been through the same thing before or something similar and whether it's like changing your business model or in my case like going through a divorce and then coming out of the closet and usek big big moments that happen no one figures them out on their own and so for me it was very much about stop talking stop writing about you know your voice doesn't need to be heard right now you need to listen to someone else who understands what this is and so when it came to type one and talking about that publicly I very much needed a few months of just listening to other people and I was joining like countless private Facebook groups just trying to find people who've been living with us for a long time to hear that it was going to be okay and I just heard enough of that eventually that it kind of just became a tipping point of okay I see the other side I know how this will move forward and I'll do my best like I always do and that's all I can do now one thing that I noticed that cropped up in your life over and over and over was a relentless focus on the positive where you could be talking about anything whether it's type 1 and you've certainly made that transition in the writing to seeing the optimism and what what I've learned and all of that stuff in fact you did like a seven bullet point what I learned like one diabetes which was all like this wildly optimistic we're even saying like the body is an amazing thing yeah it's like wait a second here's somebody who's in the throes of type 1 diabetes right which is hey the pancreas just totally shuts down sorry so the body's really letting you down so for one of the things for you to learn through all of that is the body's this amazing thing and it allows us to carry around these great minds and you start talking about all these amazing people that you interacted with how much of that is did you learn as a kid is it a tool you've developed like how'd you end up there um I definitely did not learn that as a kid I was a very like angry angsty 90s kid and I think it really wasn't until I kind of got the chip knocked off my shoulder a bunch of times whether it was in college or really figuring out what it meant to run a business online and all the hurdles I encountered where I realized okay no one's perfect you can choose to move forward with this and make it or let it make you bitter or you can choose to try to find to learn something out of it and if nothing else life gives you constant challenges and chances to fall on your face and it just seemed silly not to try to at least learn something from that moment so I try to be positive I think sometimes I'm not as positive I wish I could be but I do feel proud that I do try to take all those hurdles as moments to learn something about myself or the people that I work with yeah it's interesting and if I had to guess why I can tell you what it's like from the outside that I can do objectively the other is going to be me guessing from the outside you are offering people a positive anchor in this storm that you're going through and while I'm sure internally it you're maybe discounting the positivity that you put out into the world because you know how much of the negativity is is your own mind but your ability and foresight to know I need to find something even if it feels a little fake in the beginning I'm going to put that out into the world and then it you know I mean just reading the comments on your blogs it actually then comes back to you in this loop because the framing that you put out into the world is so positive that you really invite that into your world and pretty cool it's true that what you put out there generally does come back to you for the most part I mean I still have a lot of people who just want to yell at me about what I wear what my hair looks like or any of those sorts of things but I found that the more honestly vulnerable that I can be when I'm ready to not run rushing in anyway but the more honestly vulnerable I can be on the Internet even in small ways just encourages people to do the same and you know there will be a thousand other design blogs that come after mine that are bigger or more popular or with younger your people and at the end of the day the real heart that I take home from my job are those conversations that happen with people and whether it's about type one or just the struggles of keeping a business exciting and fresh and still relevant after twelve years those conversations via email or in person that's the fuel that keeps me going because you know internet numbers are great and you know being able to pay your bills that's great but I really I really thrive and run on those conversations and being able to have even if it's just a split second of realness with somebody that's what keeps me going interesting so you posted something that I really resonated with and you said I'm going to paraphrase here don't be trapped by your success right you might do something it may do well but if it doesn't make you feel more alive if it feels like it really drained you and at the end of that you're just exhausted like don't do it even if it's posting big numbers it's your best post ever but it made you feel drained don't do it it's not something you learned the hard way absolutely I mean I don't think you can be a blogger of any genre to blog for this long who hasn't made all the wrong decisions before you figure out the right ones at least the right ones for now and I think I learned how to set boundaries by not setting them at first and I learned how to freeze things online in a way that felt comfortable for me by not phrasing them correctly at first not that's a hard lesson to learn you can't learn it without just spectacularly doing it wrong a million times yeah yes somebody deep in the throes of all those mistakes right there with you I understand that completely there's a story that I want to before we move off of transitioning an identity and all that that I'd love for you to tell I think I wrote down the exact quote and this is so like this was so powerful for me all right so this was at your senior portfolio review and your think about this you're getting a degree in art you have to present your portfolio your teachers who have a significant amount of authority and power over you they tell you what they think and this is what her teacher said right while she's standing there this is awful you'll never be an artist you're never going to work in the art industry and you don't have any talent how do you bounce back from that I was like I wanted to lay on the floor I was like missus it's like that yeah it wasn't even aimed at me so like what do you do with that you cry up a lot in the hallway with your other teachers it's funny that moment I forgotten about that moment but it really for the first like five years of having a design sponge informed so many of the decisions I made because I felt a need to prove myself not not even as a fine artist because I think I knew as a fine art major that was not going to be what I ended up doing I just wanted to be around our and I thought I had a good eye and I had no idea what to do with that and I went to a wonderful school but just a liberal arts school where you know interior design and product design or even just criticism and the larger sense wasn't an option so I cobbled together what I could in fine arts in art history and some writing stuff and all of that ended up making sense with design sponge but I didn't know it then and ultimately that Professor was right and I realized that now I really wish she had said that in a different way I wish she had pulled me aside and said you know I've seen this before I think you're pushing in the wrong direction but I think he felt like I was wasting his time and that there were a lot of students who would go on to be painters or sculptors and he could tell I was just doing my best but it worse wasn't good enough so I don't know I think in some way I'm really glad he felt that because it gave me the motivation I needed to try to prove him wrong and then ultimately realize I didn't need to prove him wrong I just needed to figure out where my play flows and for me I couldn't find it I had to build it and there was no pre-made job or place where I truly felt at home and it wasn't until I built design sponge that I realized oh I'm building the community and the support system that I need and I have to cobble that together from people all over the world and I'll do a little bit of my own artwork and I'll do a lot of writing and I'll do all these different things that together make sense but we're never going to be the traditional finer career that I maybe thought I could have the man in the moment that was not fun but it was really really rough and I thankfully had another professor who with my printmaking teacher who came up to me and said he's wrong you're going to be okay I don't think this is what you're going to end up doing but you're going to do something wonderful and that little moment of just someone having a little bit of faith in me was kind of all I needed and I just passed up I moved to New York City the next day and hit the ground running and have literally never looked back we got to talk about that so that is that is a nearly superhuman feat to me so you've just completed this degree which getting into the college you'd already transferred colleges you go there you think you're going to be a journalism major only to find out hey I didn't even ask if they have a journalism degree and they don't so now I have to figure something else out you go into fine art which is your passion and you get to the end of it and you get that most hateful and aggressive quote but the next day you still have the guts to take on the most terrifying city in the world the place where they say if you can make it here you can make it anywhere and they say that because it eats people alive you make your dad drive you there the very next day you show up in Brooklyn and you start building something so off the back of somebody telling you like you're never going to work in this town kid and you you say well then I will build my own monolith like that's so nuts it's so courageous that it that when I heard that story that's when I stopped in my tracks and I was like alright this person knows something amazing like and and how you're able to forge that into something beautiful so for all the people out there who either have already been kicked like that will get kicked in the future what's the soothing process that you went through to to move to something beautiful even if the soothing process is I'm going to tell this guy right and I know that was part of it but what what is that soothing process to find enough courage and self-confidence to move forward what's interesting is you're saying the words soothing and in my head I'm hearing the word sieving because I think sometimes that process of moving forward is fueled by nurturing and an understanding and finding a good place and sometimes I am so fueled by just wanting to prove someone wrong but I am somebody who is so so motivated by someone not believing I can do saying whether its start a business or and I remember when all the magazine's folded and like the late-2000s and everyone's saying like well you're going to have to go find some office job now because there's no way you can make that blog work and I remember thinking oh really like go ahead challenge me because that is exactly what I'll do and so it starts sometime in that kind of angsty place so someone telling me I can't do something and then wanting to make it happen but I think the suiting process tends to happen when I find people who've been through something similar and if you're working with independent artists you're in a really good place to find people who understand what it feels like to not be able to make ends meet to not be able to get their first second or third project to be successful it's just it's a group of people who understand what it feels like to do things on your own and so luckily when I moved to Brooklyn that's a borough full of people doing things on their own and without knowing it I very much plugged into that first generation of makers and artists and designers who were going to do everything with their own two hands from the business aspect to the creation aspect and finding those people to spend time around which is a very positive group of people who could encourage you to push past failure or push past doubt and that was really really important to me can we tap it out on the anger yeah yeah this is something this is people get weird when you talk about this but you're gonna give me an in because I have an angry neutral face right at a resting face oh yeah so when I talk about being anger people like yeah of course he's angry which actually is not what resides in my soul by the way but when somebody who has brought so much beauty into the world and you just look at your website and it's beauty on the surface and it's beauty as you dig in and realizing you really I mean you can really feel you trying to find the thing beyond the aesthetic that's real and people can connect with and it's actually going to make their world and the world at large a better place to hear you say that look part of the recovery period is to get angry is to be seething raging mad and it's it's one of those uncomfortable inconvenient truths that I think is worth talking about and you know when I look at what I've done in my own and you know the great jay-z lyric that reminds me of how I felt and he said I'm in the penthouse claw your way up and you know that's that was the kind of thing that I needed and a lot of times it was spurred by being so angry because nobody thought that I could do it or nobody made me feel like anything I was doing was a value but you you have that trigger in you where it's legitimate like you now I'm mad now I'm mad and I have two choices I can stamp that down and we saw find a you know a nice happy place yeah is very powerful and people need to know how to do that but then there's also times where you got to be like alright I'm pissed and I'm going to do something about it I'm going to come out I'm like I've been backed into a corner I'm going to rage and that has its place and I think people are afraid to use the whole gamut of human emotion but like there is that there is an intoxication in true anger that people can leverage to do the incredible it's my maybe not best from a writing standpoint what my most effective writing happens when I'm angry because it's that point that refers me to throw caution to the wind to speak straight from my heart and to say something exactly the way I want to say it and so often when you live online you're used to really carefully and detailed like overthinking everything you say to say what's the best way you can say this to piss off the fewest amount of people and that's a big part of my job because I don't run a website that's controversial or you know negative and so I really do try to think about how can I say this in a way that makes people feel a part of the conversation and not judged or not angry but every now and then something will set me off in that little spark of a moment you do get the greatest response because you're just putting it out there and you do get a lot of kickback to when you're not you know super filtered but I love this moment if I can't find that realness and in any other whether it's a website or a magazine or television show or whatever I get bored and I want I want a few little sparks of fire I think those are good moments and people don't expect them from people in my community so much because I think face of the design community is so often like a really happy young blonde girl and that sort of look is great and fine but that's not who I am and I think everyone expects me to be like a human cupcake and like really like sparkly and happy all the time and not that I'm not happy but my version of happiness is not that so it's it's sometimes just a shift of showing people yeah I literally had spent one time someone pulled me over to trade show and she was like you're so much black you're so intimidating I'm sorry like I just really thought you'd be like a bright pink dress and I was like why I do like pink and that's great and I have worn pink dresses before but that's like not how I'm most comfortable and she's like Oh a little disappointing oh oh yeah but I mean you're not who I want you to be yeah but that's the reality of living online is that someone you know people build up an idea and I did the same thing with the people that I follow and read online is I imagine them to be a certain way and then when it's slightly different there's an adjustment and I think because I mean obviously my my version of being known on the Internet is so small compared to a lot of people but even the things I encounter meeting people they're so comfortable to tell me exactly what they think about me as if I'm not a real person so I think sometimes that lack of filter lets me feel a little bit more comfortable with being slightly less filtered on divine sponge yeah I can I can get that it's man it's crazy that that people say stuff like that it's weird because you feel like you know them in some ways right and you've never met them and then you can sort of begin to close them into a box but with you in particular I'm a little surprised because as I was doing as I was doing the research like every time I thought I had to okay I know who she is I know what this interview is going to be we're good yet we can roll let's go then you'd be like oh yeah and the screaming females is my favorite band and I was like oh let me look them up I've never heard of them and you start playing their music he's like okay well that wasn't what I expected and then in the next breath you'll do an interview and somebody's like oh what are you listening to right now and it was like 90s hip-hop and I was like what what is going on it was little Kim de Bratz and some I never heard the time babies right I put it on and I'm like okay another unexpected one so I go through your list and it was like the the dismemberment plan or something like oh man woman so just amazing amazingly eclectic so I'm I'm very surprised people managed to fit you in a box well I think a lot of times that's my fault I think I think living online I do choose to put certain things about myself online and certain things I keep to myself whether or not that's like a conscious choice like I don't write about the music I listen to so much online because I don't run a music blog so it doesn't come up as much but I do I find I lived in Portland briefly in Oregon for a summer and I went to go see like some sort of you know post-punk riot girl type band and I had a girl come up to me you know and it's like dark like smoky Club and she's like are you on design cause I was like yeah yeah a dress why are you doing here I just thought like I'm doing the same thing you're doing like I'm listening to like an awesome band and this is great and I think there's just sometimes people they want to think of you as one way and and it is sometimes easier as a as a brand to really kind of put this one version of yourself out because it's cleaner and neater and easier to understand and so I think I started a podcast a few years ago as part of a way to have these like longer-form conversations that would allow me to be a more fully realized human being and it attracted a very different audience of people who who liked they like different things or who weren't interested in the design part of my life but we're interested in the business part or my weird fascination with horror movies or whatever it was and so I think as I've gotten older and as the business has progressed it's been so much more fulfilling because the newer readers or followers of the site are interested in a more fully formed version of me or the brand in general and that's really very rewarding yeah I want to believe that that's been a big part of why you've been so successful because that's that's present in your earliest writing right all the little surprises the things that I don't expect the the pushing for more hearing you struggle with I don't want this to just be about aesthetic I want it to be something deeper starting a scholarship to the scholarship like I sorted the scholarship before it was had really taken off so I'm like wow she you know no office no I don't even know if you had employees at that point but I have a scholarship which is incredible what is that inward-looking relentless quest and not for perfection because you've been very clear that that doesn't exist but but that hunger to evolve where does that come from um well you're talking about the scholarship in particular it brings up a point for me that I think is a big driving force in my life which is kind of a recognition of privilege and realizing that even in my toughest times I've still been able to pay my bills doing what I love that's not something most people get to do for a wide number of reasons and I think you might sure to the scholarship I paid for it myself I never even thought of getting a sponsor I just thought I cannot believe I can sort of pay all of my bills through the slub I don't have any business having this money I mean we're not talking about a lot of money but I had like a couple extra thousand dollars and I thought I don't feel right having that somebody else should happen and and then I realize that was a terrible business officiousness and I've made those decisions over and over I think about the passion behind it before I think about the funding and I've repeated that error many times but with the scholarship I recognized that there were so many young kids I mean like really like middle school kids who didn't even know what like graphic design was or product design was and I wanted to be able to fund the next generation of people to do what they wanted to do without restrictions and so many scholarships are very they come with a lot of red tape and they come with a lot of this can only be used for this specific purpose and I think creativity happens in the gray space it happens when you have the funding to take an unpaid internship or you have a little bit of money to take a road trip and discover something new and I wanted to fund those moments and so that's where my scholarship came from which was very much about not a ton of money but it's enough money for you to maybe even just try new materials and buy stuff you didn't have the money to experiment with before and maybe in that moment you'll discover you're really good at or love that one thing and so I think I've always been filled they wanting to share whatever wealth whether that's financial or emotional or just community wealth with other people because there's nothing fun about running a business and feeling like you're up on a hill by yourself just what's the point but I mean for me that does nothing so if I can't bring other people up with me or expand that platform to give other people a place to talk it just feels so self-serving but it just doesn't feel right to me so I think that desire to kind of always bring people in to a wider circle has been something that's fueled every project whether it's the book or a podcast or what an event series whatever we've done over the last twelve years it's very much been about trying to bring in the greatest amount of people into this happy space we've created so you know the young upstarts right now they're going to work around the clock they're going to go to all the shows we're going to well that they're going to use their youth to grind it out what do you have in the way of advice for them to to both do the things they need to do to launch their career but to not lose sight of at the end of the day fulfillment is the only thing that's going to bring you any lasting happiness I think the hard thing is when you're 21 and you're grinding it out you don't care about fulfillment like that's just not that's not worries that wasn't where my head was at that age it was very much about I like want to support myself I don't want to have to get a nine-to-five job I don't have to work in a cubicle how much work do I have to do to make that a reality and then what can I do that's fun that lets me travel that lets me meet the people I admire and for me writing for magazines is very much about just I want to meet these designers that I think are so cool here's a vehicle to do that I wasn't thinking about like will this make me happy as a person will this what will happen in 10 years it was just very much about like cool I can pay my rent and do this fun job so I'm going to do that until the wheels fall off and that's going to be great and I think when it turns like 27 or 28 I started thinking oh okay like there needs to be a greater purpose here and I started looking more into that but I feel like your 20s in those early days of like figuring out your business I don't think there are rules and I think if someone had given me a set of rules or lessons to learn from at 21 I would have like crumbled them up and like thrown over my shell I've been like I'll write my own so I think it depends on who you are I think there are a lot of people who are responsible and forward-thinking young people running businesses and for them I would very much to say no one will ever have your business top of mind the way you do and I got so much bad advice in the beginning from people that looking back is very clearly about feeling threatened and them telling me oh don't do that that's a terrible idea it was a really good idea but it was an idea that maybe would have made me a competitor and so I think looking back I realized I was the only person I could really trust in those early days and and now I can't run a business like that the idea of me being the only person I consult 12 years in ludicrous because I don't know everything and now I know more about how much I don't know but when you're 22 which think you know everything and that was how I ran my business and thank God someone finally told me like hey you're not the end-all be-all you don't know everything and I think that's that's an important lesson to learn like in your mid to late 20s what's crazy though is I don't you could say that's it that same person could say that same thing to a thousand people and so few of them would respond like you do and it's the same thing that triggered me with the teacher story is to be able to take a negative and turn it into a positive to find either the you know the anger enough to push yourself forward or just a fuel your confidence that I'm going to show these people but being able to see beyond the people that are trying to strip you down intentionally or unintentionally to get to a goal is incredible enough but then to also be able to listen to criticism and say hey there's actually something here right and so when you said when we were talking about the teacher when you said you know I'm actually glad he said it and he was right like that you can that you can admit that he's right how do you do that because it's so it requires a knock to your self-esteem we wait 10 years I realized he was right no I I think it's you commiserate with people that understand what it feels like to hear stuff like that and that's what lets your guard down so the you can be open to the message I think when you realize everybody gets criticism like that there's not a single person who has never heard them someone tell them like you could do this better and for me that's been having friends who are bloggers because no one really understands maybe maybe like actors understand in the same way what it's like to live somewhat publicly and have people judge every single aspect of what you do that's a really difficult thing to understand because then you still have to go online and do the things that make those people happy right and that's a really difficult place to be because if someone tells me they hate whatever I'm doing and that my face is stupid and hate my writing it's not my natural inclination to go back and figure out how to make that person happier and how to create content that makes them feel happy because my natural inclination is to just you know but but that's not what it is to work on the internet if you just tell everyone like off you don't have a job anymore and so it's really forced me to like lower my ego a lot which was good and to really listen to other people more and for the most part the criticism I get is coming from a good place and it's really easy to tell when it's not I think a lot of times when you have someone give you really difficult feedback you can see projection happening or someone feeling threatened or someone's coming from an experience where it didn't go well for them and so I can feel that when that happens but I can also feel genuine support and concern and it makes it a little bit easier to take it in and I'm not good at criticism right away like it takes me a day or two to really kind of see that someone's right and let it sink in but a day or two now versus like ten years to get my professors feedback is a good improvement that I think that's one of the most powerful skills that anyone can learn is to separate the message from the messenger right so okay maybe it was delivered poorly aggressively it made me feel this made me feel that and I think everybody has to take a little bit of time to adjust but your willingness to look through it to find the nugget of gold like one thing I tell people all the time is one of the secrets of my success was people were throwing criticism at me all the time you're dumb you don't know you're doing and at first I saw them as rocks and I was I was being hit with rocks and so what's your instinct when somebody's throwing rocks you're going to build up a wall you're going to build a shield and so now the rocks are hitting the shield and then one day I thought wait a second what if what they're throwing at me are actually nuggets of gold then I have to lower my defenses I have to take the shot to the head and it's going to suck and it's going to hurt it may even draw blood but then at my feet is a nugget of gold and all I have to do then is pick that up and I'm a little bit richer for it and just switching that metaphor from it's a rock to it's a nugget of gold they hurt the same yeah but one has value beyond that initial thing and and just sort of repeating that in my head like these are Nuggets golden nuggets gold allowed me to do you're talking about which is lower your ego so that you can actually be open to it and the irony is it builds a bigger business right it does and when you have that shield up you're blocking all the good stuff too and that good stuff is what keeps most of us going so I think it was good for me to realize that for all the things that came at me that were difficult to deal with like there were always going to be one or two that were helpful and nice and so and I do think those things tend to balance out at least in my experience yeah that's that is super poignant and useful advice how do you go from it being a nice big brick wall to being a screen like other behavioral changes that you make daring just to be present and commenting again what does that look like I think for me it looked like a lot of therapy and figuring out what it what it meant to truly be vulnerable because if I'm presenting this like idealized version of vulnerable Grace that's not real that's that's still rounding off all the edges and I think people can tell when you do that and and there was a big thing that happened in the design blog community which is a very insular niche and there was this moment where everyone participated in this trend share something you're embarrassed for someone or shamed ashamed with the works ii thought was a very interesting word choice but it was share something that you were ashamed for other people to know about you and some people shared incredibly deep deep things about feeling racism in their community or not feeling like strong enough as a working mom and it's really tough stuff and then a lot of people just said i work in my pajamas and that's that's not something to be ashamed of not a real vulnerability it's like a cute adorable version of vulnerability that drives me nuts because I feel like it's playing with people's emotions and I feel like if you're really going to put yourself out there and be open and be vulnerable be real about it like really lay it on the line because there will be someone who knows exactly what that feels like and they will feel more at home and more comfortable in their lives having read that and even if it's only five people out of 5,000 that read it it is so worth it in that moment to not sugarcoat it I try to keep that in mind a lot that's really interesting how people they're so hungry to connect and I can't think of anything to cheer somebody up more make them feel connected more than to have somebody that they admire admit to a similar what they perceive as a fault or you know something the things that really really embarrass me are always the things people throw back at me as like oh man me too you know what I mean like it's never the stuff I think is cool about myself it is always like yeah ridiculous stuff like how poorly I scored on my SATs and I was really trying like this is not like I oh I'm a poor test taker nope I just didn't know the information and when you can get those moments that are that are real and legitimate and not like schadenfreude I didn't there are some people who are like oh good she screwed that up too like a shot and snot and Freud how does that mean German student break it down with when you genuinely sort of take pleasure in someone else's struggle or I feel insulted schadenfreude schadenfreude yeah awesome and it's like if someone trips and falls and you're like kind of happy that it happens and I just you know I think people feel that towards like movie celebrities a lot or it's like oh someone dumped them like good I'm glad that happened that's not a terrible thing to do to anyone and I think there's a lot of that with people who live online where they think like oh she messed that up and they're not happy because they connect with and understand that they're happy because they don't want you to have the perceived happiness they think you do and that's that's a difficult thing to process because that's a very real feeling for a lot of people who read especially lifestyle bloggers so weird lifestyle well but I think a lot of people think everyone happy shiny big house lots of cars like everything's perfect and so they want you to fall they want something bad to happen and so rather than diminishing the success whatever that is that you've earned I think it's important to just be vulnerable in the moments when you can and it's you know take those moments and be real about them and don't don't sugarcoat them I love that talk to me about fear like this was something because you really hit it from two different perspectives which I find fascinating and what brings this up is don't being vulnerable scary right like am I going to be rejected like how's this going to go and when it's on the internet it was forever I've deleted one post and that was an everything else has stayed as an embarrassing example of what I used to do or how are you to talk and it's important to have those milepost to look back and see what you've learned from mistakes that you've made but fear in general it's a huge motivator for me and it's it took me a while to recognize that emotion and push towards it rather than just hightail it look and the other direction like as a you feel it coming on and it it is a trigger to go into a habit loop of like okay I'm scared now I'm going to move forward it's a trigger to stay put because my natural inclination when I'm afraid of something especially when it comes to business is to just move away from it it's literally shut the door peace out I'm done I don't have to do this anymore this is too hard and as I've gotten older I realized that's that's the green light that says here's the thing you need to pay attention to and I do think a lot of that is just from like going through therapy and talking to somebody who can help you understand that those are the challenges and those are actually hidden gifts those are things that if you figure them out and untangle all those like gnarly threads that are knotted together you will learn something so valuable so I may not be like aces at figuring it out right away but when I feel that moment of this is terrifying to me and like I have to do it and that happened with the book I just wrote because I was supposed to write a totally different book and just never did it and had called my accountant and I was about to give my advance back and I said I just my hard fun in it I can't do it I'm embarrassed I did this to myself but then I had this moment of why do you know what I really actually want to write about and I know what I want to talk about and like wrote this proposal with my wife and just sat down and then I didn't want to turn it in and I thought no no I I can't actually have the thing I want like this is too good and it's too much of what I actually want so I'm sure that if I turn this in I'll be rejected and it would hurt too much to fail at something that really really mattered to me and so I was paralyzed for like 24 hours and just sat there and stared at it and thought what happens if I do this and it doesn't work out this will hurt too much but then I heard myself saying that I was like you don't feel like this is often this is a good thing for you to feel you need to be scared you need to fall on your face you need to take big swings and see what happens and thankfully it worked out but that was a good reminder that I needed to do things more often that scared me yeah and I've read the book thank you for sending happy and if I'm not mistaken when you said hey I want to do this totally different book they said that's great I'll fantastic it's amazing you still have the same deadline yeah which give you only a couple minutes right yeah how did you write that book in two months it was that book was fueled entirely on passion and teamwork the expression that it takes a village has never been truer with the project I in in two weeks came up with all the women that would be in the book and the goal of the book was to be as inclusive as possible and representation was the goal and so for me that meant reaching out to people who maybe didn't have that feeling from design sponge because inclusivity has and representation has never been our priorities until like the last few years and so I was reaching out to people who didn't feel like they had felt at home and my sight before and I had to undo a lot of damage that I had unknowingly done and I had to retouch people who had no idea who I was and just constantly explain why they should even consider being a part of this and that process all happened like around the clock 24 hours a day for two weeks until we signed everybody up and then booked just totally ludicrous amount of plane tickets and just ran around the country interviewing as many people as possible and honestly that process I'm glad the book of coming out but that process was almost more valuable than the book for me because talking to all these women at various stages of their career from ages like 19 to like their early 80s there were still so many commonalities between the teenagers and the people with just so much life experience but it was wonderful to be reminded that everyone still feel scared of things all the time like no matter how much success they've had they still make mistakes they still you know make terrible business decisions and have to fix them and that was such an important lesson for me to learn at that point in my life and I'm so excited to be able to put that out into the world for other people to read yes what I really responded to was here you have this like insane breath of women right just different types of people from tatted-up much traditional flowery dresses every body type you can imagine every race ethnicity everything and there's just just spectacular in scope and this humanity through line is so like you were saying like you see these themes of things that you're dealing with in your own life and even as a guy I'm like I can relate you know to me like there's so many just universal principles but even in and of itself just showing that even in this tome where we've gone all over the place and interviewed people you would think would have nothing in common and you see these through lines it really was quite profound I think I hope everyone has some version of that experience because I really do feel like there's been something missing from the business especially business for women book community because so often women in business and representatives kind of like power but in like a sexy cool way like who like lady and a sharp so you like telling people off and like hash hash tag and everything and being real cool and like for a lot of people that is their a reality of being a woman in business and then for a lot of us that could not be further from the truth and I thought it was important that all or more of those women were represented but it was really important to have people who bootstrapped people who are very honest about having like their families fund their business people who are on their third fourth fifth career people who had projects spectacularly fail and I think all of us in that book in general learn more from failure than success and that's always been something I've held really true and it was kind of nice to see that confirmed that everybody really was like I had to mess this up in order to figure out what I really really wanted to do I think it was Mary going who runs this wonderful sort of like genderless suiting shop and he's in the book and like now yeah she's incredible and she says I think her pullquote was you have to be willing to be really bad at something before you can be good at it and that's really really true and I think if you're too afraid or too embarrassed to make the wrong decision it's probably not the right the right field you've got to want it so badly that you're willing to fall down or trip or make the wrong decision or say something you shouldn't say to figure out the right way to do it and I heard that echoed over and over again and it was just it was this nice communal moment of not consider a ting but just kind of recognizing that no matter where you are in life there will be these Universal hurdles and struggles and the sooner you can realize that it's not a track you can get off of it's just a track you can learn how to better navigate that was really important yeah one of the coolest comments have ever gotten about inside Quest was this fairly young guy probably early 20s said Tom you've communicated a very dangerous idea to me and that is that there's no difference between me and Elon Musk other than a set of skills and I thought yeah if that's what you get like then this was all worth it because for people to read your book and realize all of these women who have done just incredible astonishing amazing beautiful things they're just like me right they were so passionate about what they were doing they were willing to fall down they were willing to learn from that they weren't afraid to be embarrassed they they'll scrape themselves back up off the pavement and keep going and that that is absolutely astonishing and it's so cool that you capture that and it really it's surprising if you know you on the surface and it is inevitable if you've really dug into who you are and so that's been pretty fascinating to water thank you that's a very nice girl woman thank you absolutely yeah it means a lot to me and I feel like with blogs I mean let's be real blot who knows what's going to happen to blogs in the next few years and I think everyone always says like what's your five-year plan which your 10-year plan and I'm like well blogs even be a thing in five years I don't know and that's a horrible thing to say as someone who makes their living off of a blog but I feel very sort of realistic about the future of that particular platform or at least as a sole platform and I think writing this book was for me a really good time to sort of open a new chapter of what do I care about what about my job feels important to me now and for me it's always been about the platform and expanding it and sharing it with people and design has become a smaller and smaller portion of that and that upsets some people but for me it just feels like the only way I know how to move forward and writing this book was just such a wonderful exercise and sort of dipping my toe and what's next and what feels real and authentic for me now and you know I was 23 when I started my site and now I'm 35 and it's anyone else in any type of job would have a fundamental you know identity shift on that time period so I think it feels I feel happy and ready to see what comes after blogs I love the way you relentlessly self assess and the way that you're unfazed by change here you are you make a living at the blogging like we would even be here in five years with no sense of anxiety and I'm sure somewhere it's because you process through that and I'm not saying it didn't happen but change management being excited for change is a interesting characteristic you have all right last question what's your definition of a life well-lived one where you don't look backwards a lot I think I spent a lot of my early years looking back to see have I gone far enough have I changed enough will people remember me a certain way and I think the days when I'm the happiest is where I'm present and quiet and maybe looking a little bit forward but for the most part never looking over my shoulder to see if I've achieved enough to make someone else happy so I think for me life well-lived it's just being in the moment well thank you so much for having me thank you so much for coming it was absolutely incredible and pleased by all means by the Atlantic applause absolutely incredible that was that was amazing so you've got the book coming out where can they get it anywhere books are so called in the company of women it I will tell you from firsthand experience it's amazing the universality the beauty of variety hearing all of these people share something so fundamentally human is incredible and you will feel your love behind every interview behind every photo where they're framed how they're posed everything is dripping with somebody's love and care who really cares about revealing something revealing something I'm literally feeling it as I say it it was incredible astonishing her legacy of work is amazing the best place to find you is I would assume design sponge calm calm and just design sponge with all the social media channels one weird simple word you won't be let down guys dig into her world any interview you can find with her a promise is amazing watching them all is just is incredibly breathtaking do them in order do them out of order it doesn't matter but what you'll see is the evolution of a human being who is not afraid to look within herself to constantly change and evolve to make a demand of herself that she grows and is always adapting to the situation and man there's that awesome quote from Charles Darwin that it's not the strongest of the species that survive it is the one most adaptive to change and that is Grace Bonnie in a nutshell she is ever adapting ever changing finding ways to connect with herself first and everything else second and her art and artistry is all an outpouring of clearly a deep desire to discover something within herself this is all actually how I felt researching you by the way discovering something in herself and bringing it out it will make you think about yourself and wanting to discover something in yourself it's an utterly astonishing journey that I invite you all to take if you haven't already guys be sure to subscribe to the show we are out there trying to find amazing people like this that will change your life as they're certainly changing mine it's a weekly show until next week my friends be legendary take care everybody thank you so much for listening to this episode of inside quest we don't take a single listener for granted as you know our goal is to pull as many human beings out of the matrix as humanly possible and to help us do that if you like this episode please go to iTunes leave a review like it and if you loved it which I know you do please share it with people the more people that we can get paying attention to show the more guests that we can get on and the better that we can serve you guys if you want to become an Insider and you want to get access to exclusive content be sure to go to inside quest.com sign up for the newsletter we put stuff in there that isn't available anywhere else we promise not to spam you or waste your time so be sure to go there and sign up and then we're super active socially so if you guys want to follow me personally you can do that at at tom bill you my last name is spelled be ism Bravo hi ly you and of course you can follow at inside quests as well engage with us let us know what you think sending guest submissions and oh dear god please if you're in the Los Angeles area we want you to come and sit in the audience and be a part of this community it's amazing to get a chance to meet everybody so come on in say what's up and let's uh let's change lives alright my friends until next time be legendary take care you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu Classics

Views: 7,850

Keywords: Inside Quest, Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu, Jason Silva, Simon Sinek, Grace Bonney

Id: vlzHEuJRLfU

Length: 54min 59sec (3299 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2017