Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast: Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docu-series, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore. Come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org.
And in advance, thank you for your support. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Melissa Bernstein. Melissa Bernstein is an unusually sensitive, creatively gifted, and generative person who is a hugely accomplished entrepreneur. She is the entrepreneur in residence for Sounds True’s Inner MBA program, which is a nine month online immersion program and begins each year in September. You can learn more at innermbaprogram.com.
Back in 1988, with her husband Doug, she founded the well-known toy company Melissa and Doug with the mission of engaging children’s imagination. And together, Melissa and Doug grew the business to be north of a half billion in sales. As the chief creative officer over 30 years—get ready for this—Melissa conceived of more than 10,000 toys. That’s something like a new toy idea every day and a half for three decades. During this time, Melissa and Doug also raised a family of six children.
And as Melissa recounts in a book that she published three years ago, she also—during this time—was confronting and eventually discovering how to work through intense inner darkness. She describes it as demons in her head. And she wrote a book about that journey. She calls it “a journey from profound darkness to radiant light.” It’s called Lifelines. She’s also started a new company now that’s called Lifelines, and it’s bringing to the public sensory immersion products that are evidence-based and can help people come into the present moment.
Melissa Bernstein, welcome.
Melissa Bernstein: That was so beautiful, Tami. Thank you so much. I am so awed of you and excited for this conversation.
TS: When I first encountered you and learned that you had been able to be such a successful entrepreneur, raise a family of six, and you had this own inner process happening, battling with what you came to describe as existential depression, I thought to myself, “How is this possible? How can someone be so high functioning and yet have so much challenge happening inside at the same time?”
So let’s start there. How’s it possible?
MB: I think honestly, it was only possible because I was so good at repression and literally repressing all of it. And basically because when you are that dark, and when you are that despairing and you let a little bit of it leak out—which I guess I did as a young child—all I remember was the look of horror in people’s eyes when I showed a little bit of that despondency. And they would say things like, “Why are you talking like that? Why are you thinking like that? You’re a child. Go out and play. Be carefree. This is not the time to be thinking about mortality.” And I got this message that it wasn’t OK to be that way.
So still needing to be accepted, to belong, to matter, I basically knew that if I was going to be in this world, I needed to repress all of it, and I needed to anchor two things that became my coping mechanism. One was pleasing, and being the good girl and doing everything that was expected of me, and the second was, unfortunately, perfectionism, which was trying to be utterly perfect and not show a [gap] in my armor and look like I was the perfect human that never showed anything other than, “Everything’s great, I’m cool, I got this.”
TS: And what brought you, Melissa, to the point in your life where you decided, “I’m going to break this shell of perfectionism and come out and share what’s really going on the inside?”
MB: You know what? It took me forever. And I really think that we don’t share our truth until the pain of suffering becomes so great that we have no choice. And hey, I thought I was… And I thought I was being authentic. It was the only self I knew, this self I created, which was this shiny self that never showed any emotion other than, “I’m great.”
But interestingly, I could do that through my twenties, I could do that through my thirties. But as I started entering my forties, I guess I would say the cry of my soul to be seen authentically started to get louder and louder and louder, and I started to feel like almost one of my toys, this shiny bright light toy that was on a shelf for everyone to see, and was in the bright light, but actually underneath was kind of hiding the truth of who I was.
And I just started to feel very, very inauthentic. And it took me… After I started to hear sort of that cry of my soul, “Let me out, I want come out, stop hiding me under this facade,” it still took me probably another five years to get the courage to really do it.
TS: And tell us a bit, when it comes to journeying through, the through part, how you made it through, how you didn’t start to share, see people’s, “What? What’s going on with Melissa?” And kind of you could have gone further deeply down, criticizing…
Often when people are perfectionistic, then it’s like, “Oh, and now I’m exposing these struggles that I’m having. How did you make it through?”
MB: So I made these profound connections that actually showed me that what I had believed was such a curse was actually a blessing. And now I coined a word which I call “my blurs,” and basically it was two things that happened. One was I read, reread, actually a book by this guy, Viktor Frankl—Man’s Search For Meaning—that talked about his experience—his horrific experience in three concentration camps and the fact that he had to find a reason to live when he was stripped of every dignity. And that was the first time that I heard the words “existential analysis.”
Because when he came out of the concentration camp, he founded a school called Logo Therapy, which was a form of existential analysis. And when I read about existential despair and existential angst, I realized that, “Oh my gosh, that is what I had my whole life.”
I had never heard the word existential until I was about 48 years old. And I realized that I had this crisis of meaning my whole life, which had led me to these very dark thoughts. And that when I started to research existential despair, I started to go down this whole rabbit hole of folks that happen to be very creative tend to have existential despair because they can ponder higher realities and they live in their imagination.
And I started to see this connection—this profound connection—between this ability to create and see things in my head, which I just thought was a nuisance, and I thought was really actually a scourge. I couldn’t get these words and these notes and these products out of my head. But I started to see that actually it was kind of a result of this highly oversensitive, central nervous system that led to all these dark thoughts. So I started to see a connection, and that was kind of the pathway to meaning for me.
TS: All right. So I’m going to really get in here a bit because this is really interesting to me, which is it seems like some people do seem to have an extra amount of existential despair or angst. And some of those people express it in generative creativity, but some don’t. Some don’t. What do you make of that?
MB: Well, so here’s the meaning part of it that I’ve realized. So while I was creating… But the beginning of my life, for the first 20 years, I created incessantly, but the problem was I only created darkness from darkness. So everything I created was super dark—a lot of music in minor keys, verses that were really despairing and I was terrified to ever show anyone. And everything I created, I just squirreled away, never showed anyone. And because it didn’t finish the circle of meaning, it was never able to touch someone, I didn’t experience any sense of joy from it.
And those were my worst 20 years. Those were the years that I truly was in a very, very nihilistic, dark place. Honestly, I’m even shocked sometimes that I’m still here after those years. But the profound change, one of the profound dots of meaning in my life came when Doug and I decided to start a toy company.
And we were really young. We were still dating. I was 22. He was 24. And we decided… Sort of one weekend we went away, and we were like, “We are so sort of uninspired by what we’re doing in our lives. There’s got to be more.”
And we decided that we love children and we wanted nothing more than to have the potential to change a child’s life. So we decided to start a toy company. And one day, we were brainstorming products and I started to see products in my head, and I realized that these weren’t dark despairing products. These were actually light, bright toys.
And it was this like, “Wait a second, I’m all darkness. I can only create darkness. How am I making light bright toys out of such nihilistic dark feelings?” And I realized that my whole life, I had had two faucets of creativity. I have a dark faucet and a light faucet, and I turned off the dark faucet. I’m sorry—I turned off the light faucet and I only had the dark faucet channeling all this darkness.
But I realized that I could actually choose to now turn off that dark faucet, turn on the light faucet, and take that very same despair that really threatened to end me and channel it just as easily into beautiful toys that had the potential to unleash a child’s imagination.
So to answer your question, it’s a choice. Ultimately, it is taking responsibility for making meaning. And that’s really hard for people who have the demons in their head screaming so loudly. But in the end, I actually chose—I made the choice one day that I’m going to turn off this dark faucet, and I am going to take that very same angst and just keep channeling into as many toys as I can humanly create.
TS: OK, let’s talk more about this metaphor of turning off the dark faucet. How do you do that? Because I imagine that still… I imagine, maybe I’m wrong, that there are times when you still hear a voice inside your head that’s designed to punish you or make you feel bad or something, or whatever we might say that just say—“It’s all futile, what’s the point, et cetera.” What do you do? Would you make a choice in that moment?
MB: Yes. So it’s the battle between the head and the heart, and I talk about it all the time. So when I am stuck with the demons, I can’t seem to un-tether from my head because my head is a very, very dark place. Not my imagination part, but my critical brain is very, very dark.
But my spirit, my soul, is pure creative liberation. And whenever I can go there, it’s boundless possibility, and literally I can create anything I imagine, and it is turning the ordinary into the most extraordinary.
So what I have to do as a practice, and I’ve become really good at doing it because I love it so much. When I’m there… And it’s crazy for someone who can go to the bowels of despair in an instant. I can just as instantly go to the peak of ecstasy in being in that boundless creative white space. So if I can live in that space and get there, then I can create whatever I want to. So it’s really un-tethering from those demons that critical mind and living in that beautiful boundless flow of white space.
TS: So is there a moment where you see, “Oh, this is the choice point. This is it. This is a choice point right here.” At whatever time it might be during the day, I’m going to make a different choice. And tell me, how did you build that capacity of awareness, first of all, to see the choice point, and then the muscle to make the choice?
MB: It really is a matter of intuition versus ego. So I think I started to feel a certain feeling, and it’s like indescribable. It’s a feeling when you know that something just feels right and you see it so clearly. When I see things, I see them finished. I could see a 24-line verse completely finished, or I can see a product completely finished. I can see it packaged on the shelf, and it’s like… I call it the angels singing. It’s indescribable. It’s a feeling of just in incredible exhilaration.
And I think if I can allow my intuition to speak louder than the voices in my head and keep going back to that and saying, “Uh-huh, you’re not going to… And it’s talking to… It’s like, you’re not going to take me down today. I’m listening to that real voice of my spirit.”
So it’s sort of the voice of my ego and the voice of my spirit, and they’re fighting against each other. And the more I’ve been able to rely on the voice of my intuition and my spirit, the more I’ve been set free from the voice.
TS: Now, it’s interesting because you’re using this very archetypal language of demons and angels, and I wonder if you could say more about that.
MB: When I was little, I called them demons because there was this voice in my head for many years that basically said, “Life is futile. End it, Melissa. You’re going to do nothing of worth and nothing of meaning. You might as well just end it now.”
And that is the voice of… It’s called nihilism. It’s the darkest place someone can go because you believe there’s no meaning to existence. And we as humans have no ability to make meaning in a meaningless existence.
So the only thing I could… And I thought about it as just a demon trying to destroy me because the truth was my spirit didn’t want to go anywhere. My spirit was asking the question why, and kind of knew that there had to be a why. Why else would I be here if there wasn’t a reason to be here?
So I think that was the way I termed it in all my writings. Even from a tiny little girl, I used to call them the demons because they were… And I saw it as this black, ugly force that was trying to drag me down. And then likewise, I wrote a verse when I was five about, “I hope an angel hears my plea.”
So there was something—I don’t know what it was about being rescued by a good force that was fighting… It was kind of the good guys versus the bad guys, and who would win in the end. And I really would write about that duality of good and evil and the battle and who would win in the end. And I didn’t know. I shouldn’t say I didn’t know. In my disempowered days, I was positive that the darkness was going to take me down.
TS: So I want to talk to that person who’s listening who says, “I have felt this kind of—I’ll use strong language—but sort of war inside myself of some kind. I’ve felt that. Help me invest more in the angelic intuitive space—come and create from that space.” What have you learned about that, Melissa?
MB: So I would say the most powerful, what do you call it, advice or piece of wisdom…?
TS: Sure.
MB: … that my wise existential psychotherapist gave me that has changed my life is… I think when we’re in that dark place, we’re very disempowered. We believe we are a victim of the darkness raging through us. And I think that victim mindset is very common in people who are despairing, right? They feel they are completely… And I used to almost go like this—like, “Take me. Take me, darkness.” I’d throw my arms out because I felt like I just had to resign myself to my fate.
But the truth is—and one thing she said to me that maybe, again, is the most powerful thing ever heard is, “Darkness is not a force, Melissa. Darkness has no power. Darkness is only the absence of light. And we are all light. And all we have to do is shine our light and the darkness will disappear.”
And that changed my life to such an extent, because what it did is it took my disempowered state and it said, “You can choose, Melissa, whether to shine your light or not. And if you don’t shine your light, then you’re going to feel like the darkness might overtake you. But it’s not because the darkness has any force, it’s because you just chose to not shine your light.”
So I would say to folks, and I think the work of healing and practice, because this isn’t like it happens. You don’t just say, “Oh, I’m going to shine my light today. There you go, darkness.” No, it’s really then discovering what is my light? How do I discover my light, and how I shine that light so that I can banish the darkness? And that’s what I try to do now every single day.
TS: You decided that the next place after Melissa and Doug for your creative entrepreneurial expression to go was into this new company Lifelines. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s a light shining vision for you?
MB: Yes. So the truth is both Melissa and Doug and Lifelines weren’t even ever meant to be companies. We were just shooting the breeze and talking about ideas, and both of them turned into a mission that is so powerful that it even transcends products.
So with Lifelines, we had no intent to start another company because honestly… I could talk to you for hours about the travails of starting a business. And you would know. You know firsthand. It is not for the faint of heart. And Doug and I always swore we will never do this again. We would look at each other and we’d say, “We’re never doing this again, right? Right.”
So the fact we’re doing it again is actually like we have lost our minds. But through the journey that I went on and my journey to become whole… You see me today, you might be like, wow, she’s so…
This has been the hardest thing of my life, and I had to go through many years of sort of cognitive behavioral therapy and really going deep and realizing that I am not just one emotion, which is like, “I’m great. I’m a full spectrum of emotions, and I have to accept that full spectrum and really show my authentic self to the world, and that’s what I had never done.”
So in the act of doing that and finally accepting myself as the highest of highs to that abyss of nihilism at the bottom, I realized that I needed something. Now that I was accepting my full spectrum, I could either go really high into that boundless, expansive white space and never come back, because any creative who’s listening will know—and probably you too—that when you’re in that white space, I never want to come down.
I don’t want to sleep. I don’t want to… Because I’m just creating, and it’s blissful.
Likewise, when I’m in a low, because I usually go very high and low, I might never come back up. I get really dark very quickly. So I was like, what am I going to do? How am I going to be here in the world, in [inaudible] and have no tethering? So I created this practice for myself. It literally wasn’t meant for anyone else. It was meant for myself so that I could figure out how to be here every day and be all I can be and help humanity in any way I can. And that really turned into lifelines, and it turned into this idea because I started to think I need tools in my toolbox to help me. And I’m using one right now. This is one of our products.
TS: Let’s see that.
MB: I was nervous about today. I’m talking to Tami Simon on her podcast, and I was like, “I need something to hold because I am a nervous person.” So this is one of our tools.
So basically, I created an ideology, a methodology, and then out of that became this idea that I’m going to create products and tools to really support people in their practice of being kind of their whole self.
TS: Can you describe what you’re holding in your hand? What it is and what it does?
MB: Yes. So I love to hold things I need to—I shouldn’t say I love. I need to hold things, because if I don’t… And this is what grounds me.
So before we started, when we were giving your beautiful preamble, I was like, “You can’t be talking about me.” I was like, “I better ground myself or this is not going to go well. I’m going to just lose it.”
So I literally took this grounding stone. So I created… I love to hold stones, but they were missing a lot of the features that I love the most. So this, it opens up and you can put your favorite—and we’ve created—your favorite essential oil on the stone. So this smells intoxicatingly beautiful. It has my favorite citrus calm blend. So I put a calm blend on it because it’s like, “I got to be calm.” And then it closes, and then it has this amazing fidget. It’s actually ball bearings, but I can massage my palm as I’m talking to you.
And it has all these textures on the bottom too. So it fits right in the palm of my hand. Nobody sees it, and I can bring it with me everywhere. And I associate it now—it’s part of my practice, that when I hold this and when I smell my citrus calm blend, I know I’m safe. And it basically signals my sympathetic nervous system that, “You can get out of fight-or-flight now. It’s OK. Tami’s not going to hurt you. It’s going to be a good conversation. And I can go into my rest-and-restore, and parasympathetic nervous system.”
So we have about 30 products right now. This is just one of them.
TS: Yeah. And what good timing, Melissa, at a time when people are so desperately wanting to manage their nervous system in our world today, that you would come out with a product line called Lifelines. What a gift you have for tuning in to what the collective needs, as you did with Melissa and Doug, when we needed toys that we could engage with that would evoke our imagination and not just sort of do something for us.
So what’s interesting to me is within the Inner MBA program, where you’re now the entrepreneur in residence, a lot of people have grand missions. They want to do something like be helpful to people who perhaps feel a lot of intense inner pressure. but they’re not able, the way you have here, to bring it down into a product line creation that’s going to match the needs of the marketplace and create a thriving business.
And I’m curious to know more if you’re to fill in some of those pieces from going to—you called it this creative white space; this big inspired idea to getting it to hit the ground and hit the target, hit the bull’s-eye, in your case, and what you know about how to do that.
MB: Yeah, that’s where the rubber meets the road, and that’s what I enjoy doing so much. And I’ve mentored young entrepreneurs—Doug and I have an entrepreneur’s program, and it’s so much fun because I think you get a lot of people who say, “I want to be an entrepreneur,” and that’s their goal. And I guess when that’s your goal, you’re in big trouble, right? Because I think it has to start with the curiosity and the insight. And I think too grandiose mission, you can’t even necessarily break it down.
So how I start is if you want to be entrepreneurial, then start with curiosity and start by looking at the way things are and not seeing them as they are, but see them with all the potential of what they can be. So start really thinking about a problem that you see that you want to solve.
And I think on one of the cool things about entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial mindset, which has to precede the idea, is you have to be really open and curious. Because if you’re an entrepreneur once and you really have the mindset, you’ll be an entrepreneur a thousand times. And Doug and I—there isn’t anything we look at that we don’t think we could better and improve because that’s the mindset, right? The mindset is just, huh, “Why is it that way? Why can’t it be different?”
So I always say start there. And if you’re not someone who is seeing that and you can’t actually take something more lofty—that I want to save humanity or I want to help people—and bring it down to, here’s the problem—I think then I would say just keep being open and maybe work for a startup. You don’t have to be the entrepreneur yourself.
Get yourself into an entrepreneurial environment and keep collecting—I call them dots of experience. Because the truth is there’s no such thing as serendipity. I don’t think serendipity is actually the result of having so many dots of life experience. And you don’t even know why, right? You sort of have an experience and you’re like, “Ooh, that’s really cool,” and you store it away in your… I call my brain the largest kitchen in the world, and there are all these pots on burners, and you put that in a pot on the back burner, and then you collect more dots. And it’s all over disparate realms that you collect these beautiful dots of experience.
And then one day, you collect that final dot, and you don’t even know what it is, but suddenly you’re like, “Oh my gosh.” And that’s when, for me, the angels sing. Suddenly, it’s like, “Wait a second, if I pull that pot from the back burner and I mix it with the one on the front burner, and I mix this one over on the left, suddenly, oh my gosh, that’s it.”
And it’s never what you think. It’s always combining weird amalgamations of ideas, and suddenly you’ve got it. And I think it’s that mindset that has to precede the idea.
TS: How do you know when a dot is worth putting into a pot, even if it’s on a back burner or side burner, or [inaudible]? How do you know like, “Oh, that’s…” because we have so many experiences in our lives, we can’t maintain all of them in little pots on the stove. We have to choose which ones. How do you know?
MB: I personally have learned to… It’s all about that intuition. You can’t know. So the answer is you never know, and there’s never a right answer.
However, there is a decision, and there is a fork in the road at every single juncture and a decision to be made. And I think if you become good at listening to those inner whispers that tell you, “I feel good about this one, I have [those] weird goose bumps,” and you heed it, all you can do then is heed it and get to the next fork in the road and make a new decision. And I think that’s… Doug and I, our philosophy is really “keep moving.” Even if you move backward, just keep moving. And if it’s not the right move, you’ll make another move, and then you’ll correct that move and you’ll just keep moving.
And I think if you get too caught up in, “Is this the right decision? Is this what I should do?” there’s no right decision. And there’s nothing you can do, other than become really good at heeding that intuition and learning when it’s giving you those feelings that this is pretty good.
But know that… I think someone once did this study of my creations and they found that I was only successful like 35% of the time.
So the truth is… And I heeded my intuition every single time. So know that even if you heed your intuition and you create a large thousand-person company, still, you might be wrong two thirds of the time, and that’s perfectly like awesome.
TS: Let me ask you a question about heeding your intuition. What about when your intuition is like, I’m 85% there, I’m 90% there, I’m 95, but there’s still a little voice in me that’s saying, “Are you really sure you want to do this? Melissa said keep moving.” OK, I’m going to keep moving, but I still have this little strand that says, “This could be a serious mistake that you’re going to have to walk back in the future to. We can’t wait to—we’re a hundred percent—can we—to keep moving?”
MB: Never. I have the 80% rule.
TS: 80%, OK.
MB: If you’re 80%, you go for it. Because if you don’t have that question, then that means you’re not doing anything new and indifferent. You have to be questioning it. If you’re a hundred percent, then it’s probably not that innovative and revolutionary and that much of a risk. So if you don’t think every single thing that Doug and I have done, we’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know if…”
Still today, every decision we make, we’re like, “I don’t know if it’s going to be right or not.” And isn’t that… Again, isn’t that the fun of life? As long as you know and you start to get more confident… And that’s what I can tell you, having done this now for 35 years. Is every decision we make right? Not at all. I don’t even know if half of them are right, to be honest with you. But we’re so good about then making the next decision and retrenching and regrouping if we get it wrong and not stopping, and knowing that it’s OK. We are going to make continual mistakes.
If we’re doing new things that have never been done, we’re going to get it wrong a lot. But it doesn’t mean… And that’s the other thing. We think in our society, it’s so black or white, right? You either get it right or you get it wrong. It’s a right decision or a wrong. It’s not like that at all. Usually, it’s somewhere in the middle, right? It maybe wasn’t perfect, but you got close to there, so if you make this little tweak, you can get it over the edge.
TS: Now you said, “Isn’t that the fun of it?” And I immediately thought, “No, that’s actually the hell of it.” Because you do these things and there’s some part of it that doesn’t work out, and you lose a bunch of money on this, or you have to backtrack and correct something here, or even somebody could end up feeling hurt by how things went and there’s repair that’s required and how it went. And you mentioned that for the longest time in your life, you coped by being a perfectionist. So I’m curious how you got over that in terms of taking all these risks and dealing with the feedback of things not always being perfect.
MB: It’s the best question, and I will tell you how, because unfortunately, you cannot know the success of a product until it gets into the hands of consumers. No matter what type of market research you do or studies ahead of time are consultants, you got to get it out there. And my need to create products that impacted people was so great that I had a choice. Either I never put a product on a shelf and say my track record’s perfect, or I actually take the risk and put them on shelves knowing that they might fail, but they also might succeed and that I’m going to touch a lot of people.
So ultimately, my need to get the products out there and channel this inner chaos into something hopefully impactful was greater than my fear of rejection. And I learned something profound. For a perfectionist, there’s nothing harder than being a product inventor because there’s nothing more punishing, and it’s immediate. And people are not kind. They’re not like, “Oh, I love this,” but they’re like, “I’m not buying your product because it doesn’t resonate with me.”
So consumers are brutal, but it cured me of my perfectionism. And it also made me see, again, the rigidity and prison that perfectionists put themselves in. And the reason I said that’s the fun is because perfectionism is the least fun, right? When you can’t even take a risk because you’re so terrified of getting a 99 instead of a hundred, that’s, in effect, you’re shackled, right? You’re shackled to homeostasis. You’re going nowhere.
But when you can have the courage to say, “I’m going to try something that’s never been attempted, and I might fall flat on my face, but then again, I might get this incredible success,” to me, it is pure adrenaline. And I’m willing now, again, to risk the failure to have that intoxicating feeling that nothing… Honestly, I don’t need to jump out of planes. I don’t do any risk with my body, because when I put a product out there, it’s akin to jumping out of an airplane, not knowing if your parachute’s going to save you or not.
TS: How did you develop the capacity to be reasonable, gentle to yourself when the market said, “Double thumbs down, Melissa?”
MB: It’s an amazing question. And at the beginning, I was not compassionate to myself. I was that inner critic, because again, the perfectionism was like, “What is wrong with you? You should have known better. Why did you put that product out?”
And of course, hindsight, right? I would be like, “Well, of course it wasn’t going to sell. Look at the packaging, or look at the price point. But then what happened?” Again, because I have such a need to channel the darkness, I started to look at what I deemed failures with a critical eye, and really see that most of the time it wasn’t like that black or white. Most of the time when something failed, there was actually something that I could do to that exact same product to turn it into a complete winner. And I can give you an example.
TS: Sure.
MB: Or other times, it wasn’t even about the product itself. It was about the timing of society. So in 2006, we introduced a salad set, and it was a cutting food set with lettuce and all the vegetables in a salad bowl, and we brought it to our biggest trade show, and nobody ordered it. Literally, I think we got out of it maybe 12 pieces ordered.
So I would put things… I had this wall of shame, I called it, with all my favorite failures behind my desk, and I put it back there. And there, it sat for literally ten years because I was like, I like salads, maybe no one else does. And the truth was, in 2006, people were not eating salads. It was not… But ten years later, in 2016, suddenly there was a salad craze. All these salad chains started opening up. And I looked at my back shelf and all my forgotten toys, they keep calling to me. This one was like, “Melissa, come on. It’s time. It’s time.”
So I resurrected it, and I added some organic kale and spinach and cool little croutons, and it became, that year, one of our top 50 products. So in that particular case, it wasn’t a failure of product. It was a failure in too early before its time. And one of the cool things about doing toys for over 30 years is I actually got to see that, over three decades, sometimes it wasn’t a failure, per se, it was the wrong timing, or a little subtle price issue, or a packaging issue, or something that could so easily be changed to turn a failure into a resounding success.
TS: Now, you mentioned that if you feel 80% confident or higher, you’ll move forward. And I thought to myself, “God, I bet Melissa’s life is moving pretty fast. I bet she has the feeling, an inner feeling, of things progressing swiftly.” And I say that because I think of all the times I’ve pulled the emergency brake on various things because I wasn’t at something more like 95% or something.
So I’m curious: is that true? Do you have the feeling of your life moving quickly, change and forwardness or not? I’m curious.
MB: I do, because I think one of my over-excitabilities because of this heightened sensitivity is called psychomotor, and it is a heightened arousal that makes me kind of constantly need to keep doing. And I worried about that a lot, because being a spiritual person, I’ve been into like—I got to get to the point where I can just be, and I don’t need this fervent creative force all the time and need to create more and more and more, which is kind of my mode. And again, my wise existential psychotherapist—who’s 20 years my senior, so she’s seen a lot of life—I was explaining this to her, and she said to me, “Melissa, I don’t know where you got that. You will end your life before you will be sitting on a mountaintop just being.” And she said, “Creating is your form of being, Melissa. And I demand that you continue to create.”
So I love that advice. And the thing I will say that that is a little bit of a qualification on that, if I am tethered to the result of the creations, then it becomes very egoic. But I’m not anymore.
Believe it or not, I’ve evolved to the point where I just get such joy, again, in channeling chaos into tangible form that I don’t really even care that much if it touches others. I just need to do it to be here.
TS: Now you mentioned that from a very young age, you had these questions of meaning. What’s the meaning of our life? And here, you’re describing this creativity and the flow of creativity as your total joy place for… Is that, in and of itself, meaningful enough for you? Does that deliver on meaning?
MB: It’s part of it. So I’ve been such a student of meaning and helping myself derive meaning, and then using that to help others derive meaning, that I now call it… It’s my own word. I call it a pie of meaning. And it can’t be just one thing. Because if your pie is only one flavor, and God forbid that something happens to that one flavor, your pie is empty, and that’s very dangerous. So I feel like your pie needs as many slices of different flavors of pie as possible.
So yes, as a creative being, one of my real areas of meaning is not just creating. It has to be creating that can actually be put into the hands of someone else and impact their lives. Because I’m also a crafter and I make [inaudible]. I am a creative, but when I just make it for the sake of making; it’s joyful, but it doesn’t bring me meaning. So it has to touch others. And then there’s a whole bunch of other things in my pie.
TS: Tell me.
MB: Gosh, OK. So when I was in my stoic years, I really didn’t have any real friendships because I never showed any vulnerability myself. I was very like, “I’m perfect, but you can share your issues with me.” So I never had any deep friendships ever, and I literally didn’t start to develop real friendships until about 10 years ago, which is crazy. I literally could say… Doug obviously is my best friend, but in terms of outside friends, like female friends, none of them. So now that I finally showed some vulnerability, I’ve developed these amazing friendships. They’re so important to me. And I’ve realized that friendship is give-and-take, and you have to take time for a friendship, which I never understood. So now, friendships are a really important part of my life.
Nature and music and sort of experiencing all the extraordinary in the ordinary of daily living is really important to really allow myself to appreciate how lucky I am, which is hard. When you have a nihilistic streak, it’s hard to appreciate.
So I think that, and then my family—oh my gosh, I have six children. I have Doug. I have an extraordinary… I’m so blessed for that, and I want to have a really good relationship with them, which takes time.
TS: So…
MB: [Inaudible] a few things.
TS: And I just want to make sure I understand this whole concept of the pie of meaning. Do you feel it’s for each one of us to fill it in and say what our slices are. Or what we need to create our pie—that’s the work each one of us has to do?
MB: Yeah. My contention is if you do not have meaning in your life, you will, by definition, fall into a state of despair, and it’s called an existential vacuum. You will be in that place where you’re apathetic. You just fall into that apathy. And usually when I start to understand a person’s story, it’s because they aren’t doing anything that is giving their life meaning. And I get it. And also, it’s a Catch-22. When you’re in that dark state, you feel powerless to do anything. And I was there. I was a hundred percent there, which is why this whole meaning has changed my life to such an extent that I’m now… I feel obligated to help so many others find it themselves too.
TS: When you work with young entrepreneurs, Melissa, whether it’s in the Inner MBA program or at Duke University, and you’re listening to them share their ideas for their product, and they’re sharing where they’re at, when do you have the thought, “Oh, this person’s going to make it. They got it,” and other times, you’re thinking, “I don’t really know. No matter what I say, I’m not really sure?” What’s going on inside you?
MB: It’s an amazing question. And I laugh because we always would do that exercise. We’d be like, “We’re going to make it, not going to make it, going to make it, not going to make it.” The number one reason these businesses fail is lack of focus. So I can tell right away by how focused someone is on… And we say create a product that people are clamoring to purchase, a product or a service, and you need to be so passionate about your product that nothing else matters. And I always know when they’re focused on their social media or their logo or who they’re going to hire or the partnerships that they don’t have a chance, because it’s all about the product.
And if your product isn’t solving a problem and it isn’t something… I think of that product as so sacred because you are going to ask someone who’s worked so hard to open their wallet and actually pay you for something. That is a pretty major act.
And you’re going to have to be offering them something pretty special for them to want to… I’m getting nervous now saying this with our new products coming out, but for them to want to do that, it’s a big concession on their part. So you’re going to have to be giving them something really special.
TS: The first time I spoke to you and you shared this saying that you have, it’s all about the product, damn it, but it’s all about the product, and inside, I was like, “Yeah, I believe that. I [one] hundred percent believe that that’s true.”
And I went back to various members of our team who were wanting to talk about all these other things, and I was like, “It’s all about the product. Melissa Bernstein said it’s all about the product.” And I got this pushback, like, “Tami, the people matter. The marketing plan matters. All of these other things matter. Stop saying it’s all about the product.” And I’m like, “No, I’m with Melissa on this.”
But what would you say so I can say it back to the people I work with, to the naysayers who will say it’s about all these other things too, the cash flow, et cetera?
MB: If you have an extraordinary product, everything else is just icing. So sure, once you have your product in hand, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, consumers are waiting there with their arms outstretched,” and while it’s open, “Give me your product,” sure, then everything else can be the juice to light it into a bonfire.
But the truth is, without an extraordinary product, none of that other stuff matters. So I think it’s just the order in which you do it. And I think until you have that product and it’s really perfect… It’s shocking how many imperfect products are on the market. We are always just flabbergasted. How could they have put that out? I’m a regular user using it because we’re… User experience is probably the thing I’m most passionate about.
The product has to be intuitive. It has to function in a way that’s effortless. It has to be… I have a whole, I call it our PEP—our product essence principles—because PEP is vitality. So I have a whole product essence, principles manifesto that’s all the things that are essential to a extraordinary product. And I think it’s shocking how many companies, if you went down those PEPs, don’t even attain any of those.
TS: One of the core theses, if you will, of the Inner MBA is that when we develop ourselves, when we commit to growing on the inside, we have the possibility of creating more extraordinary results in our business life. And I’m wondering how you see that. What kind of inner growth do you think really matters to a founder, entrepreneur, businessperson?
MB: It all comes back. It’s exactly what you’re saying because it’s all about your intuition. And I truly believe that every good idea comes from this beautiful intuition, and connecting, again, those dots of life experience. And like a trail of breadcrumbs, ultimately, they will take you to these epiphanies that really are your brilliant, revolutionary ideas.
So the more we can quiet the clamor of the outside world… Because again, today too many people derive their values from society’s values, and I think we don’t… Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a values recognition class before we got out of school? But we never talk about, “What are my personal values? What’s important to me?” And we think what’s important to me is what our families told us should be important to us or what society told us.
So I think the quieter we can get and the more we can learn to trust our personal values and intuition, the more that will lead us to really having a mission for our business that is something that you can be as passionate about today as you were… For me, I’m as passionate about open-ended play today as I was 35 years ago, and that’s pretty cool. That’s a mission that has transcended even 35 years of my life.
TS: Now, Melissa, you mentioned early on in our conversation that for you, you can see a full product in your mind’s eye. You see the whole thing. You can see a 24-verse written piece of poetry. You see it all flowing through. Now, for a lot of people, they don’t have that kind of inner sight. So they might say, “Look, I spend some time quieting my mind. It’s not that interesting in there. I’m not getting brilliant intuitions related to product creation.” What would you say to someone who wants to have more intuition that they can act upon?
MB: I think it’s all about… Some people have it easier than others, so there are a couple different answers. But if you want to just really, I’d say become more honed at listening to your intuition, just become quieter. And at the beginning, by the way, you won’t hear a thing. If you’ve been externally focused, you are going to be crickets in there. Nothing’s happening. But all I say is be patient. Give it time. Allow yourself to experience life. Just get in the mode of turning off the clamor.
And when you experience something, think about, “Wow, what was amazing about that?” Start to ask yourself questions that really start to connect to who you are and what you value.
And there are lots of value exercises you can engage in. You can start to ask yourself questions like, “When am I the happiest? When do I feel really in my flow state?” Right? “What did I enjoy doing most as a child? What did I want to be when I grew up when I was a child?”
You can start to ask these questions to hone in on kind of who you are. And I think the more you’re able to sit with who you really are and not listen to who other people tell you you should be or want you to be, the more you’ll start to hear it.
And I truly believe that the best ideas… All my product ideas come when I’m not thinking about it. It’s really not about having an objective of having a good idea, because that’s the very antithesis of having a good idea. It’s really just about being open to curiosity and possibility when they just hit you. It really is always the case with me.
TS: And the last thing, Melissa, I wanted to ask you about is this notion of extending lifelines to each other. And I say that because you’ve been so generous with students in the Inner MBA. I’ve seen you reach out all over the place to people who are asking for your business advice, and it seems like we do each have this opportunity to be a lifeline for each other. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are about that.
MB: So I had a personal epiphany just a couple years ago that I didn’t need to change the world, like thousands of people at a time. It was about making one person at a time feel seen, heard, and that they matter. And for some reason, it was almost like when the voice said to you to start Sounds True. It was almost like that voice. It said, “Stop focusing on masses of people and just focus on one person at a time.”
And there’s something about the sacred trust someone gives you when you have a Zoom with them. When someone from Inner MBA reaches out to me and I say, “Let’s get on a Zoom call,” and I see them for the first time, and we’ve never seen each other, we don’t know each other, and they share this really deep part of themself, there’s something so precious about that. And I feel that I’m given such a gift.
Because if I can say one little thing that even, maybe not today, maybe it’s planting the seed for a year from now, but that maybe gets them to change even slightly the way they’re thinking or the trajectory of their lives, then how many lives will they change?
So it’s really about the… I’ve really become about the little ripple, and there’s nothing I find that gives me more meaning. I don’t know what it is. It’s something really powerful about the one at a time.
TS: You’ve been listening to Melissa Bernstein. She’s the author of the book Lifelines, as well as the creator of a new company called Lifelines. With Sounds True, she’s the entrepreneur in residence at our Inner MBA program. It’s a nine month online immersion program produced in partnership with LinkedIn and Wisdom 2.0, and it begins in September of each year. You can learn more at innermbaprogram.com, and you can reach out directly to Melissa if you’re interested. You can reach her at melissa@lifelines.com.
And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after the show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
