Melissa Bernstein, co-founder of toy company Melissa & Doug, on creativity and her lifelong depression

Here's something remarkable and not in a good way. Disengaged employees cost US companies almost $1.9 trillion a year. That's a lot of zeros. Why? Because when teams lack the right skills, productivity declines, turnover increases, and strategies stagnate. But it doesn't have to be that way. At Project Management Institute, home of the PMP and globally recognized certifications, your people can learn to collaborate, deliver on time, and actually get things the cost of not upskilling way higher than the investment Project Management Institute. Find the answers@pmi.org.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This episode's Remarkable guest is Melissa Bernstein. If you are a parent, you may have given your child a Melissa and Doug toy. She's that Melissa. It'd be natural for you to think that this podcast is about how she created her remarkably successful toy company. You'd be wrong. If you want that story, I suggest listening to the excellent interview Guy Raz conducted with both Melissa and Doug in his podcast How I Built this. By contrast, this interview is about how Melissa found herself after 50 years of trials, tribulations, and silencing. If you think Melissa is a good entrepreneur, wait until you hear her poetry. One more thing before we get started, you need to know the definition of sophomoric. It means something that's juvenile. You'll hear why that definition is important in a second. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use it. 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest. 2. Taking notes while being brief about speaking gigs. 3. Drafting the structure of keynote speeches. 4. Storing manuals for the gizmos that I buy. 5. Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds, and office layouts. 6. Wrapping my head around complex ideas with diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out product. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. And now here's the poet and toy mogul Melissa Bernstein. So, to put it mildly, when I started reading your book, it was not at all what I expected. I'm so used to I've done about 70 episodes of this, and when I interview CEOs, it's typically like your How I did this guy Raz kind of session, the story of your company and how you started it and started in a garage and driving all over Connecticut and trying with the videotapes and all that stuff. So I was blown away by it.

I don't know if that's blown away in a good sense or you were just like, oh, my gosh, I cannot interview this one.

No, no, no, not at all. It's good to have challenges and differences. So I appreciate, basically, you're talk about exposing yourself. I don't think I've read a book where someone exposed herself or himself more than that. So I congratulate you.

Thank you. It took every ounce of strength and courage that I have to do that.

I want to read you two of your poems that I just love. Okay. You like them? Yeah.

Oh, my God, thank you.

The first one is, keep it coming. Bring it on. Attack me with your wrath, for I no longer feel the blows as I have found my path. I just love that.

Thank you.

And the second one is, the best adjusted folks are those who never fitted in, for they needed to forge courage from the wellspring deep within. Wow, that is such depth there. Oh, my God.

Thank you.

I read more poetry in the last 24 hours because of you than in the first 66 years of my life.

So thank you. It brings me to tears because, as you know from reading that the one word I can never use to describe myself is poetry, because I was rejected for my words very early on and never saw myself as a writer at all.

Let's just pretend that the person from the University of Connecticut is listening to this podcast. What would you say to him now?

Look at me now, honey. No, I wouldn't say that. I would say you really should think about your words a little more carefully when you craft them, because something you write seemingly seemingly obliviously can actually change the trajectory of someone's life. And I didn't write for 25 years because of that one word, sophomoric, that he used to describe my verses. And it really changed my life in such a way, a negative way. So I think I would say words can be very powerful. And your one word surely was in my life.

When I read that part of your book, I'm like, what goes through a person's mind when they write something like that? I can understand sort of the neutral, no controversy. You're highly qualified, but we have so many other candidates, we just aren't able to offer you a position. But why did he have to call your writing sophomore I don't understand that.

I understand. Because the truth is, it was so simple and so different. And to be honest, I've had the same thing happen with my toys. It's this sense that when something is too simple, it cannot be accepted by people who view themselves as erudite and big thinkers. And the same thing happened. Luckily, our toys have sold. We sell, whatever, 65 million toys a year, so those have proven to be commercially viable, but without the awards and the accolades. But he couldn't do it. It would be demeaning his entire career to give those words credit.

Well, shame on him. That was a ridiculous thing to say. Even if it was sophomore, it would. It's a ridiculous thing to say.

Thank you. You are giving me much needed validation from 30 years of heartache because of that.

Let's just say that I'm not calling him to interview him for the Remarkable People podcast. Okay.

Thank you.

Now you have to. You have to ask yourself, what if you were accepted? The entire arc of your life may be different. You might be Maya Angelou instead of a toy mogul.

Who's to know? But the truth is, now, obviously, it is one of the profound dots of my life that have connected because it showed me what a true white space creative goes through. Because it wasn't just that. You know, anyone who thinks differently is going to be criticized and rejected time and time again. And that's what's happened to us again and again. So I should have known, had I had the foresight to know this actually means, Melissa, that you're doing something different because it is Being rejected by the head of a poetry department. I would have saved myself a lot of anguish, sadly.

Well, this is a little late to help you, but you never know. So I have a favorite book. This book is called if youf Want to Write by Brenda Uland. Are you familiar with it?

Not at all.

Okay, so you need to read this book. It's U, E L, A, N D, and it's obviously from the title. You can tell it's written for writers, but it really pertains to any creative endeavor. And so the gist of this book is, if you want to write, write. Don't wait for permission from people to tell you that you're a writer. Don't take an English class to learn how to write. If you want to write, write. And one of the big things she addresses is some of the worst critics is not the person in charge of the University of Connecticut Creative Fine Arts Program. It's inside your head where you don't think you're a writer.

And.

And so that's maybe the biggest problem for people in that position. And the reason why that book meant so much to me is because at the time that I wrote my first book, the Macintosh way, this is 1987, I didn't consider myself a writer. I took AP English. But I promise you that my English teacher who has passed on is laughing in heaven, because let's just say I'm probably not the person at the top of the list who he thought would become an author.

Yes, a major author. And you know what? One of my life missions is to get people to move from their head to their heart. And my number one mantra that I say every single day is step on out of the head, moving into the heart, free to channel all dread into jubilant art. And I think when we go here, which is the critique, which is the analysis, which is that professor at the University of Connecticut, we leave where all creation lives and where all innovation lives, which is right here. So even with Melissa and Doug, over all the years, so many people gave us advice like, you can't make simple toys. They're not going to work. They need screens, they need apps, they need all sorts of gizmos. I never, even though it made me want to go up here and question everything I was doing and everything we were doing, I knew that if I left my heart where all that intuition and true white space creativity lied, you know, I would lose the ability to truly create something different that spoke from my heart.

When you started off that answer, you basically recited poetry. So can you just recite poetry just at will now? It just comes out of you like that.

It does, because every one of my verses was a lifeline. It saved me. And when I write a lifeline, it's because I have either some anguish that I can't seem to. It's like a needle poking in me that I can't seem to assuage unless I write a verse about it or I'm pondering a question that I don't have the answer to. So it becomes my method of taking this chaos inside and making sense of it. So it's like a piece of me. It becomes interwoven into my tapestry, and I know probably thousands of them. And every time I. I'm in a situation where, like, the same question arises, I bring up a verse and I say it to myself so I can get through it.

I mean this as a compliment, but you're like the female Jewish Muhammad Ali. I mean, you can just.

I Don't know. But no one wants to hear it. So it's not like. I mean, half the time I'm muttering to myself and my kids are like, what are you doing? Like, with this disgust, I'm like, I'm either writing a verse or reciting a verse. Sorry.

You can float like a butterfly and sting like a poet.

Maybe.

Yeah, not quite. Maybe what you can do for us now is because you mentioned this so many times, the magic number in your book is 50. So can you just explain what was going on inside you for those first 50 years?

Wow. You know, it was something that I couldn't even put words to until I was 50 because I truly repressed it to such an extent. But all I can say is, from the time I was born, I felt like I wasn't at home in the world. And I felt this deep, deep sense that something was very wrong. This sense of not quite rightness. It's like that. An itch that's so terrible, that's deep inside you that you just can't scratch. And that sense of just being off. And what it was, I now know, was this sense of utter meaninglessness to life. And these questions that started ever since I can remember. I think I was probably either two and a half or three, basically saying, what is the meaning of life? I don't get it. And why am I here? And what am I meant to do while I'm here? And because I couldn't much less even voice those questions and certainly couldn't get an answer to them, I was left with just not able to become comfortable. And because I was so unsettled and so burdened with these questions that I couldn't answer, I basically needed to repress, deny and disassociate from everything I felt.

Do you have any explanation for how this came to be? Why were you like this?

I now know so throughout my life, because I didn't have an explanation and I couldn't show it to anyone. In fact, innately, I channeled it into music. I wrote songs and I wrote verses from the time I was like two and a half, three years old. They just came out of me, but they were so dark and so despairing that I never showed them to a soul and never even looked at them myself after I wrote them. I just squirreled them away and tried to be normal. And I think I never was normal, unfortunately, even though I tried to be. And I realized again at age 50 that I suffered from this thing called existential depression, which we are born with, like some People have existential crises because of an event, but not me, not I. I was born with this.

Can you define existence, existential depression? Because those two words may not be familiar to most people, to be honest with you.

I read the thesaurus as a hobby, as a child, and I did not know what existential depression was. So when I saw those words just by accident in a book I read by Viktor Frankl and looked them up out of curiosity, I was floored because it described my entire life. So, basically, existential depression has three different arms to it. It has existential nihilism, which is where I started. Existential nihilism means there is no meaning at all to life, and we as people are insignificant and unable to make meaning. And that is the worst part of existential despair. When you're there, you pretty much feel no hope. And that is when I was at my lowest of lows. I was an existential nihilist. I did not believe that I had the ability and anyone had the ability to ever find meaning. It's not a good place to be. However, the really incredible thing is I always had this rabid curiosity that I needed to find the meaning and I wasn't going to end it. Even though I was really close, I needed to find that hope. And that's when I moved into existentialism, which still posits that life has no meaning. However, despite that, we as individuals can choose out of awareness, free will and personal responsibility to still make meaning out of our time here. And that was where I moved into. Then there's a third part that's called absurdism. And those of us who have existential despair, we always think of life as absurd. We look at what's going on, people racing around, crazies trying to search for meaning, and we realize that it's all absurd. Because, unfortunately, we're realists. We're like deep realists. Too realistic. But the absurdism philosophy says, although there's this conflict between an utter lack of meaning and man's search for meaning, we must accept that and simultaneously rebel against it by embracing life and making whatever meaning we can while we're here. And that's where I have come out, I'm happy to say.

Were your parents aware of this existential depression this whole time?

Not one person, including myself, was aware of any of this until I was 48 years old.

And was there particularly, a catalytic moment where the light bulb went on?

Oh, yeah, there was. I call them my. My dot moments. And yes, there. There was. I read a book by Viktor Frankl called Man's Search for Meaning, and he talked about existential despair. And when I looked that up, I was utterly flabbergasted because it explained exactly what I was. Even more, it said that those who suffer from existential depression are highly creative. And when I saw the list of some of the people who were afflicted with existential depression, it was like, no, that it couldn't be people that I just obviously am not in a category with, but just people like Beethoven and Mozart and Hemingway and Tolstoy and a lot of others who are not prolific creators too. But then it further said that and those who have existential depression and are prolific creators also have these things called over excitabilities, which are a heightened arousal of your central nervous system, which makes your sensitivity to life so much greater. And I always said both the beauty of the world and the pain of it are impossible for me to bear. And I always felt like my tuning knob was just turned up a little too much. And when I was little, I said, please turn off the noise I've lost track of the joys I can't hear anymore with this deafening roar I can't see anymore with this staggering light I can't feel anymore with this stifling fright And I wrote that when I was like five, because it seemed like everything was just like this crescendo in my body and that people would touch me and I'd jump because it was like my nerve endings were just on the outside of my body. So once I read about the existential despair and the overexcitabilities I suddenly had.

Can I interrupt you for a second?

Yes.

So you have used the term existential despair and existential depression. Are they one and the same?

They are. It starts with existential angst. So you first feel the anxiety, and then if it doesn't get, you know, fixed, it turns into depression, despair, anguish. Like they're all. I use them all interchangeably. It's just a lot of existential mess.

You mentioned in your book Two More dots, and one dot was when you were rejected by a sorority. And do you look back at that now and say, why did I have angst and despair over being rejected by a sorority or at post 50. How do you view that, the trauma that that caused?

That's an incredible question. So the biggest trauma, and it's funny, we're starting this community Lifelines, and we're having all these really deep discussions now and we're having so many about this, about what it means to be Your true self. And I think the thing that I'm saddest about, to be honest with you, is I truly nearly killed myself to be like these girls I wish to emulate. Emulate, which was tall and blonde with long hair and a great figure, like all the things I'm not. And that was sad in and of itself. But the saddest part of it was I rejected the girls just like me who I could have had these incredibly deep friendships with. And what I didn't put in there, or maybe I did, is a couple sororities really wanted me with girls exactly like me. But I looked at them with disgust and basically said, I'm sure I didn't say it, actually say it, but I thought, I don't want to be like you. I want to be like these girls who are rejecting me. And it's such a testimony to how I killed myself throughout my early life trying to be something I'm not and not accepting who I was. And I think another example of that which is just so heartbreaking. In ninth grade we get these things called superlatives for like exemplifying a certain quality. And I wanted to get one of the ones related to looks more than anything. I wanted to get like most attractive, best smile, best dressed, best couple. And I ended up getting most musical, which should have been like, it was one of the only skill based ones because I must be truly musical. And I got it with this guy and I looked him up and he's like a professor now at UCLA and he's like this prolific musician. So I should have been so happy. But I was so upset about that that when I got my yearbook at the end of the year, I literally ripped out the page and threw it in the trash. And how sad is that? I wanted to be something superficial and it doesn't even seem like it's me, but it was. That's. I cared so much about the superficial and didn't care about anything that was truly meaningful. It's heartbreaking. So I want to help others not go that path and through our community, show others that they don't have to hide their things that make them unique. And unique is good. Unique isn't bad.

Two more points that tie into this. Those two girlfriends that you asked for advice, in their opinion, both of whom kind of blew you off, right? They said, get over it, it's not that bad. Whatever. They only saw the facade. So what did you learn from those two instances?

It was the same thing everyone else did. And I wrote a verse like they could never just accept me as the one I truly was or always hoping I'd get better, though depression never does. So it's that sense that people always wanted me to be better and to be different and to not be who I was. And the thing I wanted to say to them, but I couldn't, is, but this is who I am. So if you're telling me I need to get better to be accepted, then you're basically saying that how I am is unworthy. And it truly made me feel even more unworthy and that I never could show who I really was and never let them see. Because the very few times that I showed even an inkling of the despair that was really just swirling around me, I was disdained, I would say, by anyone I showed it to.

So the question that I have for you based on that is, people who listen to this podcast or read your book, how do they spot people who have these issues? And then assuming that they can figure out how to spot these people, then how do they help people?

That's such a great question. Thank you so much for caring about that. What I've realized is to be a highly creative person, you will have these overexcitabilities. It's a condition. It's. One is tied to the other. My blessing is my curse, and I will never be free of it, or I will be, or I will not create anymore. Like, you must be highly sensitive to the world to be able to create from nothing. It is just a condition for creativity. And I now get that because I never quite understood why I could just create it and write something without just having it, just have it pop into my head. But I now realize that the cost of that is tremendous anguish, like the full spectrum of the highest of highs to the very lowest of lows. So I think knowing that and the goal in our community is to make people aware of this, I want to speak out for the creative misfits out there. I feel like it's my duty because so many of them don't have a voice and are in the shadows, creating and locked in themselves in despair of some sort in order to create. And I want to make people aware that we are weird. Like, we are not going to be your average person. Like, we think differently, we act differently. We are out of the box. We, you know, have quirks, and that's what makes us able to create. So if you like the things we create, and then, damn it, you better accept us in all our eccentricities. And I really. I mean, it is so I'll get emotional. Because so many creative people take their lives because they feel they're never understood. And again, at lifelines, like, we want to embrace every single person for all they are and show the world that it is in those different qualities that our gifts emerge. Most of us.

So would your answer to the question how to help be simply accept them as opposed to try to get them to be normal?

Exactly. We all deserve to be accepted for exactly as who we are. And I think that was always inside my deepest sadness. And I think one of my verses. I hope I can say it perfectly. But creatives are maligned for being overly dramatic, exceedingly despairing, and uncommonly dogmatic. But it's those divergent qualities that birth such brilliant art. And we all deserve a chance to be exalted from the start.

You can just whip that out just like that.

It's like my toys. They're my children, so I have to be able to honor them. They're like my babies. But I think that's my lament, is that we're maligned our whole lives for being who we are. And yet, what do you expect if someone's gonna create a symphony out of nothing? Do you think it just comes from being not sensitive to the world? I just. I think we need to appreciate our. And that most creatives are gonna be introverts. They're gonna have a hard time speaking. I mean, I haven't spoken until now. I've spoken mostly through my hand, through creating. I don't speak through my voice. I never did. But I'm doing it now because I feel like there are too many people who are suffering because they're denying who they are.

And what happens if you go on Good Morning America and hundreds of thousands of people start writing in saying, I heard you, and you described my life, and is that the intended outcome?

Absolutely. Are you kidding? That would be the greatest thing ever. Because we're starting this incredible community, and I believe we're doing something that no one has done. We're offering no promise. Lifelines is basically no promise. We're not saying we can make you better, we can fix you, we can change your life. Not even in the slightest. We're saying that we accept you in totality. We're saying that you are not alone. That starting with Melissa, she felt her whole life that no one would ever understand her, that she was on an island and no one would ever accept her for who she is. But she realized that that isn't true at all. And once she had the Courage to say who she was and shout it from the rooftops that there were people like her. And there were people who said, oh, my goodness, I feel the same way. And there were people who said, yes, show me how I can have the courage to say who I am. And that's all I'm doing. All I'm trying to do is through having the courage to finally accept myself in totality, which took 50 years. I now, Doug and I now, we want to take the goodness that we gained from 32 years making toys and funnel it so that we can offer this free community that offers content and a journey and all these things for people just like me.

And where are your kids in this? Are they going to, like, pick up this book and say, oh, my God, I had no idea this is Mom? Or have they been along this journey with you side by side?

So that's the craziest thing. Like, the craziest thing is my own father, who about a week ago, for the first time, I told him that I wrote this book and that I was afflicted with this. He said to me, and this is maybe one of the most staggering things ever. He said, I find that hard to believe because you are the most optimistic, happy, contented child ever. And I found that so sad because it just showed how incredibly well I hit it. And I knew I hit it well. I mean, I was so disassociated from how I was feeling that it took me four years. When I finally admitted that I was broken and needed therapy, it took me four years to actually start to be able to feel emotion. I was that disassociated from it. So I think nobody really knew, excluding myself. That's the weird thing. Like, I fooled everyone. And my facade, which was a facade of perfection, like, it was no chink in the armor. It was like a perfectly constructed life in a perfectly constructed box that I lived in. I don't think anybody knew, honestly.

I'm going to ask a rather tactless, tasteless question now. Okay, go for it. How did you not get divorced through all this? You're carrying quite a burden here for 50 years. I dare say most people might have gotten divorced. So can you explain that magic?

Yes. Doug has been, like, the most incredibly supportive person through this whole thing. And to be honest, when he met me and I was 19, I was at my lowest of lows. I had a terrible eating disorder, and I looked like a sick. And he really was the first one. We never really talked about it because I was in such denial, but he forced me to eat. So I'm probably only here today because of him. And I think forging Melissa and Doug, although again, part of me was so afflicted, right? And in such denial of this angst that just suffused me. The other part was a miracle. When we formed Melissa and Doug and I was able to get take all this darkness because, as I told you, for 25 years, I channeled darkness into darkness, and it had no meaning, right? Because when you funnel darkness into more darkness and it doesn't touch light or touch anyone, you can't bring meaning to it. But when I saw that I actually had this choice. This was when the existential nihilism changed to existentialism. Because through creating toys, and again, just by accident, I realized that I had a choice to channel darkness now into this profound light through making toys. And that was salvation. And for 32 years, Melissa and Doug has been one of the greatest joys of our lives. And we've really reveled in every single moment. So it wasn't that we weren't having an incredible life. We were building this company. We had six children. We were raising kids. And to be honest with you, my life gave me such structure and I couldn't even breathe right. I was running this large company with Doug. I was the mother of six children. I didn't have time to think. And it was actually really good because I just basically did what I needed to do to survive and be a good mother and good wife and good business owner. And time just flew by. So there wasn't time to ponder.

But was this a huge surprise to Doug one day, or was he, you know, in on the inside story for a long time?

Nobody was in on it. No. It was as much a shock to him, I think, as to me. Obviously, he knew me and he knew that I was highly sensitive, although I hid most of it. And I was a creative. I had whatever vacillations in mood. But no, when I first discovered this and started to read about especially the hypersensitivities, I was like, sobbing for days because I couldn't believe that someone had really articulated what I felt like and who I was with such alacrity. It was staggering. And I think he was shocked as well. He was, oh, my gosh, this is incredible. And totally supportive, like, what can I do to, you know, support you in this? But I think we were both completely astounded.

Do you think that this excitability, do you think it caused the creative expression, or do you think the creative expression cause the excitability.

Oh, my gosh. I just made this connection last week. This is the best question you could ever ask.

Well, that's why I'm a podcaster.

Yes. So this is the really cool thing. So I've always believed, because everything I've read has made this connection not between overexcitabilities and creativity, between depression and melancholia and creativity. And basically it says that people who create. And in fact, there's even a statistic, if you can believe it, and poets are the highest, that 87% of poets are depressed. And composers are the lowest. They're 60%. But from composers all the way up to poets, it's 60 to 87%. And supposedly rhyming poets are even higher, which I am, because it's the chaos that reigns, and you need to make order of it. So you're even more afflicted, and I shouldn't say just depression. It's 87% are afflicted with some psychological malady. And that always plagued me because although throughout my first 25 years, it was definitely the despair that fueled the creativity, as I've grown to understand existential depression and understand myself, I'm not depressed anymore. And actually I'm more creative than I've ever been. So this connection didn't make any sense to me. And suddenly, about a week ago, all the dots connected, I realized two really crazy things. One is that existential depression is actually a symptom of intellectual hypersensitivity, meaning there are five hypersensitivities. One of them is intellectual, which means you really, like, ponder things and are. You're always thinking and you're really curious. That is what allows you to ponder your existence and what makes you ponder these things? What is life's meaning that gave rise? Of course, because when you ponder what life's meaning is, you usually find there really may not be any that makes you depressed. So that made me depressed. And I'll get to your original question. Also, it's the intellectual hypersensitivity that got me out of that depression, because I needed to use philosophy and really look at all the philosophers throughout history to understand how I moved from nihilism to existentialism. So the intellectual hypersensitivity got me in and out. And it's also the intellectual and imaginational and emotional hypersensitivities that allow me to create. So I was born with hypersensitivities first, and they are what fuel, what spawn the creativity 100%.

So when we encounter extremely creative people, should we assume that there's hypersensitivity going on too.

In my opinion, it's 100%.

100%?

Yep. You can't do it with. You cannot. You need such like. You know, I talk about nature, and nature truly spoke to me, like in a Dr. Dolittle way, like I heard voices in nature. You need that level of sensitivity to the world in order to forge something out of nothing. It's just. It's impossible not to.

And do you think that all hypersensitive people are also creative?

No, because there are five of them and not all people have all five. People could have one small aspect of one, and you could have an intellectual hypersensitivity. That just makes you a rabid need for knowledge. If you just have intellectual and you don't have the imaginational, you won't be a creative. Right. You'll be a thinker. But it's combined with living in your imagination. So if you combine, you start to see. It's so cool. If you combine imaginational with intellectual and emotional, they usually say the three that are essential for creativity are intellectual, imaginational and emotional, which you can understand. Right. You feel highly emotional, you feel highly in your imagination, and you're highly curious and intellectual. What do you think yours are?

I'm going to avoid that. I'm going to tell you something. Okay. So by any chance, do you know who Stephen Wolfram is?

No.

Stephen Wolfram is a mathematician and physicist. He is the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Award. And I know him. He's a friend of mine. And his conversations are always at a level about physics and quarks and particles and stuff like that that I have figured out that I can talk to him only once every 10 years or so because it takes me 10 years to recover because his brain is so much faster and bigger and on such a different plane that I am exhausted for 10 years. And I mean this as a compliment that you are the second person that I would put in that category. It's going to take me. Not. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing you again soon, but it's going to take me a while to. Shall I say recover is the wrong word because that has a negative connotation to it to now I feel embraced to embrace this. This is such a deep conversation. I am so used to people telling me, yeah, you know, I. I decided that I would create this new widget and come to find out, more people wanted it. So my partner and I, we decided to ship it and lo and behold, more people liked it. And then we changed our distribution, and that's the secret. I thought I was going to have a Guy Roz, how I did this Conversation. Conversation.

If.

If Guy Raz listens to my podcast and hears this, what do you think his reaction is going to be? Is it going to be like, are those the same people that I interviewed? Why didn't this come up in his interview?

Yeah, because people don't go below the surface. Let's be honest. You have the courage to go deep, and if people just want to talk about the superficial, there's a lot of that to talk about. Hey, we. We have a pretty cool story. We built a $500 million toy company in our garage, just the two of us, with our meager life savings, still dating. So it's a cool story in and of itself. Like, there. You don't need to go much deeper to have that really sizzle story. But, like, I'm soul, not sizzle. And the truth is, I am. I'm very. I'm a deep person, and that's where I create from. So I think for anyone who's. Who has the courage, like you, to go there, it's such a gift, because I do feel like we need to.

Go there in a rare moment of humility. I don't think it took courage for me to do this, just FYI. I think it took courage for you to write the book. So let's just give credit where credit is due. I have never had an interview like this. Oh, my God. So. So if someone's listening to this and can identify with you on any of the five levels, what's your advice? What should they do to find themselves before they're 50, if you will.

I love that. So the first thing they should do, Honestly, this is exactly what our community lifelines.com is going to do. We are going to have a whole series on hypersensitivities, and I am going to lead them. And no one's done this before. People don't even know they exist. Like, this is. It's almost like when Susan Cain came out with her introverts thing, and it was like, introverts everywhere were like, hooray, we're not weird. Like, to me, for me, this was the most important thing I ever realized in my life. And there was this one guy, like, if I could meet anyone in my life, you know how they ask that question, if you could meet someone? His name is Kazimierz Dabrowski. He died in 1980, and he spent his mere, I think, 78 years on this world trying to help people like me, highly creative people who were at risk for not surviving in a world that would never accept them. And to me, that's my only goal, to create a community of people who feel that they will never belong. And I can say to them, I get you. I get every bit of you. And I understand that your scourge is your gift, and you deserve to be here. And the other thing we're going to do, because there are many people who have this hypersensitive nature and haven't yet discovered their sparks. See, I'm so fortunate because I know creativity is everything for me. And I've been able to channel it. Like the crazy thing, when I think about the metaphor of my life. I wrote a verse when I was like 6 years old, which is, I am a mighty oak tree with limbs outstretched toward the sky, oft endangered by the elements that rage, then roll on by. My appendages are brittle, yet my trunk stands tall and sound ever knowing it's safeguarded, with roots firmly in the ground. So I always viewed myself as this oak tree, my roots here, and my arms were like up, leaning toward the heavens, which is where my creativity comes from, my imagination. But the trouble was, my whole life, my trunk was so dense with despair and depression, even thus, I created through this little vein through my limb that went up to the sky, and it found its way through, shockingly, even though I disallowed it theoretically, with everything I was feeling. But as I learned to discover who I am, to accept myself in all my hypersensitivities, my trunk has now hollowed out. And now I'm just this incredible channel all the way, starting in my roots, going all the way through my being up to the heavens. And it's like the creation now just flows through. We all deserve that ability. We all deserve to find our center, to find that spark within us that can flow all the way from our core all the way to the heavens. And that's my goal, to help people unearth their sparks, to hollow out their trunk, and to figure out what their flow is. And we all have it, especially if we are hypersensitive. Some of us just, you know, we bucked to convention, we listened to the voice of others around us, and we didn't heed our own soul's cry that we need to do.

My head is exploding here. Maybe you should go on Giraffe Rogan show. Let's see if he can handle you. Oh, boy.

I don't know if I could handle him.

You think? Yeah. You would have him. You would have him twisted into knots. The oak tree would be growing back into him. I have a tactical question for you. How do you do your deepest thinking? What do you, like, at a very tactical level? Do you. I don't know. Is it a quiet spot? Is it fountain pen and parchment? I mean, what is it? How do you do your deepest thinking?

I love that. So I have had such trouble with everything in my life. Everything has been a struggle other than creating. And I just simply can be anywhere, any place, anytime. I just travel into the white space of imagination, and I can get there in a blink. I literally just breathe and just go there. And my issue is that I don't ever want to come down because it is so incredible up there. It's pure rapture. That's the only way I can describe it. And it's bliss and. Because you know why? Because anything is possible. And I am in utter control of that big expanse of imagination. And I have created so many lovely things out of that that I know it's possibilities, and it just intoxicates me to no end. So that's the great thing. And I think, because as a child, I lived in my imagination because the world was so terrifying and I had imaginary friends, and I created an entire world up there. That. That is my muscle memory. Most people would be like, how do you do it? That is my default. So I'm fortunate. The hard thing is living here. Like, you should say to me, how do you live in this world? Because my tendency is to always want to just go up there and never come down. And that's what's most natural to me. So I always laugh. I laugh when people talk about, like, they're having blockages and, like, they're having creative, like, dearth. Because I'm like, gosh, that's never, ever been my issue. It's the opposite. It's like too much. Too much stuff coming out that it's like, stuff. Stop already.

So you're telling me that you could be on the tarmac in Newark Airport waiting for ground clearance in a center seat in United Airlines coach, and you can just go to this place?

Yep. I do some of my best stuff there. Anywhere, any place. And you can ask anybody in my life. I am always. I'm always. Because again, creativity is about connecting dots, and it's about having that, like, curiosity and seeing something again the way it is and thinking, no, this could be different. So you never know. And that's the way I feel. Like, I have such excitement, utter Excitement about the world. And that's why I love getting out and about, because I never know when I will see something. It'll be in that center seat, and I'll look at one thing and I'll say, oh, my gosh, that connects to these three other things, and that's a product. And it's just like. And I call it the angels sing. When you have that just epiphany and the angels sing, and you just know that's it.

How do you deal with, quote, unquote, normal life when the angels are always singing in your head?

It's really hard. I have to. I have to ground myself. I have to do a lot of mindful stuff, because anytime that something goes wrong or even with one of my kids, they are just whatever, you know, kids, they're in any sort of angst. At any point during the day, I'll start to panic, and I'll start to truly feel myself getting, like, unnerved, and, oh, my gosh, I can't handle this. And I'll need to continually ground myself, breathe and be like, it's okay, and try not to leave, because my tendency is. I feel like a lot of times I'm a balloon and I'm floating off. That's how I envision myself. I'm, like, going up there, and I sit. I'm watching it. I'm like, there you go. And then someone is, no, you don't. And they're just taking. They're grabbing it just as it goes out of arm's reach, the cord on the balloon or the string, and they're pulling it back down, and it's, ah, no, don't. I don't want to come back down. So I just have to. Sometimes I have to force myself, and sometimes it's okay, and I can be here. But that's my challenge. My challenge is staying here, right here, and being okay with being here.

We have to end this interview because my. My simple brain can only handle so much. It's like when your iPhone says, no more space to store any more pictures. You have to delete some or get the iPhone 14 Pro Max. That's where I feel I am right now.

Are you kidding? That is not true.

Oh, yeah, it's true. You can accuse me of many things, but false modesty is not one of them, I assure you. So when does the book come out?

The book comes out mid March, and our community goes live mid February, which will have so much really exciting content.

And are you on Good Morning America? Are you working on all that kind of stuff already.

I think it is happening. And I. Again, it's right. It's a double edged sword. Do you want it or not? But I. I hope that everyone is as incredible as you and wanting to hear this story and. And just organic. That was the best interview. Like, you didn't go by this script that you, like, had to ask all these questions.

Actually, I do have a script. I'm checking that script.

Just.

My script is better.

Okay, There you go. Your script is just better. See, you did. You don't give that impression. So that's what's such a gift about you.

Well, I hope that you get on Terry Gross's show. I think she would do a marvelous job with you. Or her, her or her head will explode. You. You tell Terry Gross that she doesn't know who I am. So it doesn't matter if you tell her. Guy Kawasaki suggested you be Fresh Air.

I'm sure she knows.

She does. Neither does Joe Rogan, by the way.

You've done pretty amazing for yourself. And you are a hero to me. Such an incredible author. And your books are amazing. And of course, before this, I absolutely read. I read. I believe it's Enchantment. Yeah. And I also read, what was it? Art of the Start.

Yes. For entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

Wow.

So they're in my book. They're in my bookshelf, so. Wow. And that was long before any of this.

Well, that's fantastic. You flatter me. I'm proud to be on your radar. So thank you so much. And I tell you, if I heard this, I would like your toys even more.

Thank you.

Because now I know there's a real. There's a real soul behind your toys. It's not, you know, simply the fast buck.

Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people would say to me that when I played with your toy, I felt like there was something more to it. And it would make me so emotional because I was like, there is. I'm channeling so much. It's my salvation. Like, it's literally my hope. So I was so glad that some people seemed to feel that because it was true.

I'm gonna put the little pieces of my brain that exploded back in my brain now.

Oh, I'm so, so sorry. I didn't mean to do that to you.

I'm gonna send this to Steve Wolfram. Say, Steve, here. I met your match, Steve.

Oh, thank you. That means the world to me. That's a real compliment. And that sort of begins to put back my ego after the professor. So thank you. You just gave me one piece of it back, so thank you.

Can I read you my favorite poem from her book? One more time? Keep it coming. Bring it on. Attack me with your wrath, for I no longer feel the blows as I have found my path. I hope you are inspired by this episode of Remarkable People. The path that Melissa Bernstein took after 50 years is remarkable. I hope that if you face similar challenges, Melissa's story will help you on your own path of self discovery. Hi, I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. Mahalo to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick, who helped me on my path of podcasting self discovery. Mahalo and aloha. This podcast is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Focus more and goof off less using the Remarkable Tablet. Foreign. This is Remarkable People.