(Cue in this great read on what the psychology of suicide-prevention teaches us about controlling our everyday worries.)Īnother, a collaboration with Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu, enlists the whimsical to reveal the real: It kept me from sleeping, it was not enjoyable, and most importantly, I never arrived at a solution for anything - a remarkably effective way to be miserable.

I used to lie awake at night brooding over problems that came up during the day. One explores our shared propensity to worry (especially about sensitive subjects like money) and the immutable human desire to, as Italo Calvino memorably put it, lower our “worryability.” Sagmeister writes: What makes Sagmeister’s maxims so beautiful and so moving is that, rather than mindless aphorisms dispensed as vacant cultural currency, they are the lived and living truths of a man who approaches his life with equal parts humor and humility, vigor and vulnerability. Eventually, he translated these private thoughts into a series of typographic artworks and public installations at the intersection of the personal and the philosophical, creating a new genre of metaphoric lettering, which ended up among the 100 ideas that changed graphic design and which he collected in a gorgeous artifact of a book in 2006.Ī new updated edition of Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far ( public library) published by Abrams capitalizes on the “so far” portion of the premise by complementing all of Sagmeister’s original learnings with 48 additional pages exploring new ones that touch on everything from obsession to confidence to love, contextualized by a triumvirate of great minds: Design critic extraordinaire Steven Heller, psychologist Daniel Nettle, and Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector. About a decade ago, Stefan Sagmeister, one of the most celebrated and influential designers of our time, began keeping a running list of life-learnings in his diary.

Sagmeister things i have learned