I am so honored to be here.

That is so poetic. Thank you.

That's a great question. I would say, the continual, incessant, rabid search for meaning. I have been in an existential meaning crisis my entire life and trying to find a way that I can leave the world a little bit better than when I entered it. For me, that salvation came in turning the internal chaos into tangible form through creating things. The more chaos I feel, the more I need to channel it from my head, through my heart, through my fingers into products. That's why I've created 10,000 products in the toy world. It's still not even enough because, unfortunately, that futile race, the search continues on in my life.

It is exactly that. I view my existential angst, that meaning crisis, the despair that in the end it may not mean anything. Instead of becoming submerged in it in my head, I've realized that I can actually tangibly mold it into a ball of energy and I can channel it through my body, out my hands, into creative expressions. For the first 20 years of my life, I didn't do that. I became submerged by it. I did create but I created dark things that couldn't touch other people. Our only meaning comes through, in my opinion, serving others and using something in us to better the lives of others. So, it's only when I channeled it into positivity that could impact others that it began to become real meaning for me.

Yeah, my life mantra has become and this is the act of living for me, step on out of the head and move into the heart, free to channel all dread into jubilant art.

If I wasn't going to become submerged by my head and go down, the ship was going down. If I became stuck in that despair, I had to actively channel it into positivity. That has become the message of my life.

It's everything. I basically made the journey from existential nihilism, which is a sense that there is no meaning to life and we as individuals have no ability to make meaning in a meaningless existence to becoming very much an existentialist, which is belief that we as humans actually do have control and the power to transform our lives through engaged, committed action.

I think the Western world and the Western culture does such a disservice. It tells us that we can pursue happiness on the outside and we will achieve it. We will achieve that elusive dream of the white picket fence, the butterflies, the rainbows and the meadows. It's a lie. You cannot achieve inner satisfaction, inner peace through external material achievements. I believed in the dream and I achieved it. I achieved everything and more than I could ever dream of, including an incredible husband in Doug, every material thing that I could have ever wanted. But the truth was, I was empty inside. I had never accepted myself as who I was. And because of that, I would never achieve any form of solace, fulfillment or bounty.

Isn't that the ultimate question? What happens to us in that next phase?

I saw them in my head from age 2. I see them entirely finished. It's basically, all the questions that no one could answer and the questions that are beyond my own comprehension. The answers came to me in these verses and I started to pen them when I was about 3 and never showed them to anyone because they were so dark. So many of them were really pondering, even at that young age. I think when I was 5, I wrote the verse, 'The burden of myself is almost more than I can bear. Rather than slip further down this mountain of despair, I will simply cry for help and hope an angel hears my plea. Or I'll not survive much longer and succumb to misery.' I wrote these as my pleas. But I knew no one would really accept me in that darkness. So, I just hid them away.

To be honest, they were such a nuisance. It was like a ticker tape continually running across my brain. I would be like, "Get out of there. I don't want to see you today." But I couldn't really stop it. I tried. Even when I would scribe it, another one would appear. I realized it was my own way of trying to make sense of what to me was senseless. The question of existence and why are we doing this silly, inane game if we're all just going to expire?

I experienced the full gamut. Sometimes it's literally 24 lines. That many completely come out and I don't have to change a thing. Other times, it's like a "Ha, isn't that interesting the way people say one thing and do another?" And I just ponder. My brain is like the biggest kitchen in the world and there are a whole bunch of pots simmering on the stove. Some of them are boiling over and they're the ones closest to me and some are on the back burner and they're just simmering. Sometimes, I get a thought like, "Ha, people are so odd the way they act and do and say different things and I'll put it in there and it's on the back burner." Then the next day the verse will come to mind. Sometimes, that verse might not be perfect. For me, that becomes one of my favorite processes, which is the honing process. It's like a river stone where the water keeps flowing over it and honing it until it's perfectly formed. Sometimes, they're perfect as is. To me, they have to flow like a song because I write music too. They have to have a rhythm and a beat and effortlessly flow. If they don't, I'm tortured and I cannot sleep or eat or do anything. If I have a verse that came out and if it is missing something, it's like a splinter in my foot. I can't rest until it's removed.

The story of my life was that simplicity. Thank you for calling them gems. I call them dark pieces of stone that weren't polished. They were rejected by mainstream society. You might say my brain is like that. But the fascinating thing is that I'm so simple. For me, those big abstruse ideas that I could never understand have to be distilled into something so simple, clear and concrete that a child can understand them. I think that was this weird dichotomy. Because I was thinking things that were impossible to even verbalize, yet trying to distill them into verses so simple that they didn't require any deciphering. Mainstream society says that things have to be complex and we need to decipher them really and reject my verses completely.

When they rejected my verses, I felt truly rejected as a person in my essence. I stopped writing verses for 3 decades after they were rejected by a noted authority. Toys became another method of channeling that complexity of thought into very simple designs that a child could easily understand.

Yeah. Doug and I faced a setback at Melissa & Doug and we decided we were going to leave toys and go to graduate school, that he would ultimately be a university administrator, president ultimately. And I would basically teach creative writing. I wanted to be a professor who taught poetry. So we applied to schools and I submitted these verses to a not well known literary department by any stretch and I got dramatically rejected. The head of the department said, "Your verses are sophomoric and not the caliber our program demands." The word sophomoric, I needed to look up. Because even being a writer, I didn't know the meaning. It meant, inane, stupid, foolish, dumb. It was soul piercing. Because those verses, I saw them in my head, they came out exactly as they were and I couldn't change them. Philosophically, it became this huge chip on my shoulder that, why do people need to make the beautifully simple things more complex? Why did they need to take something that is so pure in its explanation of something and actually layer on a whole bunch of shrouding to make it non decipherable and unable to be understood by regular people? I was livid at this, but I kept it quiet. It was a dagger in my soul.

Just by the alchemy of my life, thank goodness, by accident, Doug and I decided to form a toy company. That same philosophy, which again, is that it's all about the beautiful, authentic simplicity and those simple truths, speaking louder than the masking we do for so much. That philosophy was able to channel into something else other than words and create those toys. I was in a sense, redeemed through my second creative exploit, which was toys.

Yes. Isn't that the purpose of art? I go on a rail in my book and I'm saying, "Isn't the purpose of art to stir the soul?" When you make it something that needs to be deciphered, it leaves the heart and goes into the head. That isn't powerful. That doesn't move us, that doesn't impel us to feel. Yes, I felt like the whole thing had gotten messed up. The irony of my life is, I never liked poetry. Anybody's poetry other than Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, who were the simplest, clear poets, because I didn't understand it and I didn't want to take time deciphering it because I just wanted to feel something. I just wanted to be moved in my soul. I felt very much the same with toys because when we went into toys, everybody had forgotten about those beautiful, classic playthings that had the ability simply to spark a child's imagination.

Toys had become all toy and no child. They are all bells and whistles, they are dancing. Even back when we started Cabbage Patch and Care Bears, they had dancing toys and they were batteries. It was all a toy and the child is just sitting there pushing the button and becoming bombarded with stimuli. We believe that a good toy, which is an open ended plaything, is 90% child, 10% toy. The toy is just a bridge to unleash that child's imagination. Once their imagination is unleashed, you don't need the toy, you throw the toy away. Put the toy to the side. Then, anything is possible. Because when you're in your imagination, anything you can dream is possible.

Exactly! look at Elon Musk. When he talked about first principles, it's the exact way that I talk about it as well.

It's like taking these pots that are simmering on the stove and distilling out all the rough surfaces and being left with just the gems that you can then connect to form these incredible insights.

Just filling it down to its essence so all that exists is the beauty and the wisdom. That beautiful wisdom of it. My verses are basically taking these big ideas and distilling it to just the pithy little piece of wisdom that I can carry in my heart and become my lifelines for how I want to live my life.

Yes of course, the coach.

I have young people in my life. I'm a mother of 6, but I talk with so many young people. I think the other thing that we forget is that we've become so attached to this idea of success and what we're going to achieve that we've lost sight of the verb. We're living in the noun. One of the verses that has become another one of my mantras, is about living in the verb, which is the learning, not the grade. It's the crafting, not what's made. It's crusading, not the war. It's competing, not the score. It's the acting, not the part. It's the painting, not the art. It's the journey, not the goal for engaging that fuels the soul.

I feel like the ones you talk about and those of us who truly revel in the verb, we are living in our hearts and engaging in what we love to do at the simplest level, every single day. We don't get caught up in the titles and what we wear and how we look. I don't even wear makeup, because we're trying to show it doesn't matter. Steve Jobs wore the same clothes every day, he was trying to show it's not the trappings, it's the work. It's the engaging, the process, doing what we love every single day. I think being accepted how we do it is the key to finding fulfillment.

Oh! That is an amazing concept, because having studied existential philosophy and I work with an existential philosopher, there are two principles, whether existence precedes essence or essence precedes existence. Most existentialists say that existence precedes essence. We're just born as nothing and it's through the decisions we make that we become something. I believe what you said. Essence precedes existence. I believe that we are born with that thing in us and maybe it is channeled from somewhere else, because sometimes that's the only way you can think that that happens. Sometimes, I write a verse and there are words in it that I have to look up in the dictionary because I don't know them. I've talked to my existential philosopher about it because she believes existence precedes essence. I said, "Well, then how do you explain that?" She said, "I can't." She has studied this her whole life. So she said, "In your case, there is an essence." I do believe in every one of us, whether you see things in your head or not, I believe we have that beautiful spark of self-expression in our souls. Sometimes, we don't have a childhood or we don't have the chance to discover what it is. But our life goal is to find that beautiful seed of self-expression in our souls, figure out how to channel it so that it can come out through your hands and impact humanity. It's only when we do that, the circle becomes complete and we find that sense of purpose we've been seeking.

It's exactly the case. But the issue is that we are extrinsically motivated. From the time we're little, we're not taught to make that inward journey. We're not taught to say what makes you unique. In fact, it's the opposite. We're taught when you feel like an outlier, which is how I felt my whole life, you're made fun of. You're rejected. I was told all the time, you're too weird, you're too heady, you're too dark, you're too emotional. I wanted nothing more than to look extrinsically. That's what I did. I denied everything I was in my truth and just tried to emulate people who I would never be and was left in this middle spot. This is who I am and up here is who I'm trying to be. I can never attain it. So it's a futile race and I'm denying who I am.

You wonder why so many of us are in this state where we're just suffering and we're miserable because we know who we are. It's simmering down there, but we're trying to be something that we can never be. I think part of LifeLines and part of what I'm trying to do now is to finally accept who I was. It took me until middle age to be honest about who I was and accept what I call the blurse; the blessing and the curse of being a highly sensitive, creative person. I'm now trying to show others and parents, if you can allow your children to be who they are, not who you want them to be, you will save them a lifetime of suffering.

The channel is just the byproduct of who you are and what your philosophy and your core tenets are. For me, my core tenet is that, it's all about simplicity. It's all about distilling things to their essence and then what remains is the truth. Those are the truths that you want to yell out to the world. I think the goal in life is to go inward and discover that and then have the courage to express that to the world.

I think once you find that, it takes a lot of courage to listen to the cry of your soul. It's intuition that needs to grow. Once you have that, it'll be reflected in everything you do. As you said, Zelenski's philosophy, life should have humor to it and you should be able to find the light in the dark. If that's his philosophy, he's going to channel it in everything he does.

That's an amazing question. By the way, we have an entrepreneurs program at Duke University and we mentor hundreds of entrepreneurs every year.

So, the only way you turn off the clamor of the outside world is to always go back to your heart, your soul and the reason you're doing it. I think the only reason Doug and I are still growing Melissa & Doug after 30 years is because we never lost sight of the reason we were doing it. Every time I create a toy, I go back to that place of expansiveness. I go back into my imagination. My only goal is to unleash a sense of joy in children through catalyzing their imagination. That's the only reason we're doing it.

If you have those core principles front and center, we never did it for money. We wouldn't have started a toy company in 1988 if we wanted to do it for money. That was like the investment banking boom. But, we never did it for money. We never did it for the licensing opportunities or any of that shiny stuff. We did it because we wanted to impact children's lives and allow them to see the extraordinary in the ordinary through unleashing their imaginations. Every time we were presented with a shiny gold thing, everybody is wiggling, dangling these lures in front of you, like, "Come over here, come over here, get off your path." And you're enticed. You stop for a minute and think, "Should we go over there?" But then you have to breathe. It's literally like an exercise in mindfulness and you have to say, "Why am I doing this?" And you have to remember your core tenets, which you should write right in front of you. Then you say, "Is that unleashing imagination in a child? Is that giving a child the gift of open ended play? Is that sparking something in that child that will lead to their life passion or purpose? Nope. We're not going to go there."

We became really good at saying no. Because we said no a lot more often than we said yes. We started to disappoint a lot of people by saying, "No, we're not going to go there. We're going to go this way." We got a lot of questions. We got a lot of people whispering, "They're not doing what they should do." But you know what? It led to a purity that we really needed.

I can share another really cool story too, if you want.

I am a whitespace product innovator, meaning I don't really use a lot of outside data at all. I don't subscribe to the traditional NPD data, the market insights. I don't look at trends. I don't do anything. I don't look at fads. I literally do it from my own experience.

We had a McKinsey Harvard analyst come in, and he decided to calculate how successful I was in my product innovations. He studied the prior 3 years and he calculated that I was only 40% successful, meaning more than half the time, 60% of the time my new products failed. He decided that his goal was to make me more successful, because if we could get that 40% up to 80%, Melissa & Doug would be a lot more successful. The only way he thought we could do it was by fewer bigger bets and more consumer insight and that would change it. This was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life because, as a whitespace creator, I believe in planting as many seeds as humanly possible. I believe you can never know success ahead of time. You can get all the consumer insights you want, you can study data, you can look at what's been done, but if you're innovating, if you're creating something that's never been done, how are you going to be able to know if it's going to be successful? You're not, until it's in the marketplace.

My philosophy has always been to plant as many seeds as possible, give them fertilizer, water them, and give them sunlight. And then watch. Be patient and see which grow and the ones that grow, you give more water, more fertilizer. The ones that don't grow, you just think it's a pile of dirt. But, that's the essence of product innovation. I think it was a really tough time because it really pitted me against the mainstream and our company.

So, I love the fact and I tell people all the time that I fail more than I succeed, but that still led to 600 plus million-dollar company right now that's growing every year.

We love the act of what we're doing. For me, my salvation is the channeling, creating that toy and the belief that that toy might have the ability to change the trajectory of a child's life. Every toy I create or every product I create or every verse I create; I'm going back to that same place. It's the exact same feeling I'm conceiving for the very first time. I don't ever think about the ones I've made before. I don't think about what's happening tomorrow. I am so in the flow of just connecting to that sense of purpose. Anyone who really loves what they do, they're doing it because that sense of flow is so profound that they don't want to ever give it up. You know that someone is for real when they're going back to that simplest place. The place where it all just starts to gel and flow. That's where the beauty is.

That's an amazing question. I found tremendous salvation in making toys for 3 decades. It literally made me realize that I could take something so dark and turn it into something light. That was profound. But, I was still hiding the essence of who I was. I was almost like the toys I was creating. I was in a light, bright box and giving this sense of complete joy. I've got it all together with the world. When the truth was, I was a full spectrum. I was that light, bright self. That's part of me. But, I was also this dark searching, churning, existentially angsty person. The cry of my soul to be completely authentic started to grow louder and louder the older I got. I realized that I didn't want to die being inauthentic and not showing the truth of who I was. As you said, it always starts with ourselves in the story. I felt like I had to come out and had to just show folks that I create from the full spectrum of emotion. A lot of it is really dark, but it doesn't mean I can't transform it into light. That became one of the messages. So I came out, I went on one of my favorite podcasts and shared the truth that I had this existential angst, which is not diagnosed. It's not in the DSM, it's not pathological. It's a philosophical, spiritual condition. I wanted to share that because nobody understood what I was really going through.

I found that people got it. I received hundreds and hundreds of the most powerful, profound letters ever with people saying, "You gave voice to what I've been experiencing my whole life and no one ever understood." When that happened, when I received validation for the first time ever for coming out and saying who I was, it gave me three reasons to want to do something outside of Melissa & Doug.

The first was I wanted to show others that they weren't alone. Because, I think when people feel different, and I feel so different and so unlike the world that I would never fit in, we feel like this sense of aloneness. It's a deep aloneness. Even though I had beautiful people all around me, I didn't believe they would accept me as I was. So I hid that sense of being different from everyone. I wanted so many folks that have hid that same despair to know that they're not alone.

Two, I wanted to show others that they can take something so dark. I experience existential nihilism. There's no deeper form of despair. I wanted to show them that even if you're there, you can channel that darkness into light and make meaning. That is the definition of what I've done. I feel so grateful to still be here, to still be alive and creating, that I want to show others they can do the same.

The third, which is really important too, is, I was racing externally my whole life to fill an inner void. Again, Western culture says, race out there in the pursuit of happiness, pursue it. It's out there. You'll get there and we never do. So, it isn't until we finally make the choice, because it's a choice to stop racing out there for the shiny gold stars and the material awards and we make that journey inward to finally discover and accept who we are and allow it all to be part of our experience that we will finally find the peace and fulfillment we've been seeking. Creating tools to allow folks to do that and to create a deliberate practice in their lives so they can unlock their full potential is what Lifelines is doing.

Yes. Everyone should know that although maybe I look like everything's good, if I didn't have my practice each and every day, I would either fly off into the boundless expanse of life of whitespace and get lost up there. Because when I'm creating, I don't want to come down. Or, I could very easily fall into the abyss of existential darkness and never come back. So, literally, I engage in my practice every single day. The first are tools for my vitality, my self-care, because I tend to not be a good sleeper. I don't want to sleep because I have ideas flowing. 20x7. I don't want to eat because I don't want to take the time. I have to basically fill my well. I have to make sure I eat well, that I sleep at least 7 hours a night, which is almost impossible for me to actually do and engage in movement, not exercise, because exercise is punishing. I have to actually take a walk in nature every single day. Because nature does something to my senses that nothing else does. I transcend my rigid self and I enter the cosmos and I'm connected to something so much greater. That's really important.

Then grounding is so important. Because, I tend to become triggered and destabilized very easily because I'm hypersensitive. Grounding is my own journey and I call it the journey to inner space. It's on our website, it's free. It's a five letter acronym that I use whenever I'm becoming untethered. I stop and sense what's going on here. I perceive what I'm feeling and I picture what I'm feeling. That's the M space. I accept what I'm feeling because a lot of times, we judge what we're feeling and that's not conducive to grounding. I allow all of it to flow. If I'm feeling jealous, if I'm feeling angry, if I'm feeling sad, I finally allow it as opposed to repressing it. Then I comprehend. I go back to the inner wound and I say, "Why are you becoming untethered? Why is this getting you so angry?" And I realize it's usually not the situation or the person, it's something in my childhood that still needs attention. So I comprehend why it's happening and then I correct the behavior. As you talked about, we have a lot of flawed mind thinking. We have a lot of cognitive distortions. I correct those and then at the end, I embrace myself for being human and I engage in the flow of life, which means I do something that puts me in the flow of acting, living, creating, enjoying. I do that journey about ten times every single day. Any time I start to get off my game or I'm becoming untethered by someone, I take my quick space journey and I come back home to myself.

Yes. I love that. Basically, you need to harness that potential.

I'd say parenting has been my most challenging journey, to be honest with you. I never give parenting advice because I joke that I had to have 6 children to rectify the mistakes I made with the earlier ones. It is so difficult and I believe that, we think we're doing what is in the best interest of our kids, but it isn't until you have them that you realize how many of your unfulfilled dreams you're trying to live through your children. Believe me, I believed I was selfless in every case, and I wasn't. I had expectations for them to fulfill things that I hadn't fulfilled myself. I think it's really challenging. Before I accepted my full spectrum of who I was, I was a very flawed parent. I didn't allow my kids to feel sad because I didn't allow myself to feel sad, because if I felt sad, I might not be here anymore. My sadness threatened to truly end my life. I was terrified that would happen to them. So I never really allowed them to express sadness. My other flaw as a parent is, I've been through such a profound journey. I do believe I have so much insight and wisdom, I want to give them the shortcut. Most of my therapy in the last couple of years has been about, "How can I accept people as they are and not try to change them into where I want them to go." It's not even so much their dreams or their goals. It has saved them from wallowing. Wallowing really frustrates me. I'm an existentialist. I believe that we as humans have to make the choice to take responsibility for our lives and make meaning. So when people don't, I want to grab them there. I want to say, "Don't you see this is your one life. You have a limited time here, make meaning." That includes my children. So I have a hard time just allowing people their own experience and I want to cheat them out of their experience and live life for them.

I think the model I want to show is that you can transform your darkness into light and make meaning. That's the only thing I want to show. We're all going to have ups and downs. But, if we can take those downs and somehow harness them to be our superpower, then we have done the ultimate.

There's a story that changed my life. I think sometimes when we think too grand, when we see all these huge problems and we feel like we're just one little person, we get in our head, we become completely overwhelmed. I can't do anything, so I won't do anything. I'll hide out in my little corner and not do anything. One simple story about a year ago changed my life and made me feel completely powerful.

There is a man, Kevin Hines, I believe that's his name. He basically suffered from a lot of mental health challenges his whole life. He determined that he wanted to end his life. His life was so much suffering, so much meaninglessness that he wanted to end it. He was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. He would go through the day and if one person showed him that they cared about him, if one person smiled at him and said hello, he wouldn't take his life. He was going to basically base it on others and how they treated him. He went through the day and it was just a horrible day. Basically, people ignored him. They yelled at him, they demeaned him. At the end of the day, he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and he ended up being saved by a sea lion who basically kept him afloat until he was rescued. Now, he's become a suicide prevention advocate. That story changed my life because I realized the power of one person to start the ball rolling, to be that one ripple that could turn into a tsunami of healing.

So now, one simple thing I do is, wherever I am, wherever I go, whenever I see a person, I look them in the eye and I say, "Hello, nice day. How are you?" Because, that person might be Kevin Hines. That person might be thinking of doing something very dire to themselves, to others. Maybe I alone can change the trajectory of that person's life. It's so easy. I'm going through the day anyway. I'm passing these people anyway. If I'm in the car and next to someone, I'll just wave and say hi and I watch them drive off and they have a smile on their face. I'm a big believer that you must heal yourself first. You must be the light you want to see. You must be a shining example of engaging in the act, not the goal. Just do your thing, shine your light, be kind to every single person and show them their scene. If each one of us can do that and show every person we come across, even if it's five in a day that we see them, they're going to go through their days differently and suddenly it's going to become millions of people.

It reminds me of a verse, "When we heal ourselves, we heal the world as consciousness transcends single soul to all humanity and everyone ascends."

That is beautiful! That brought tears to my eyes. That is definitely why I'm doing it. So, thank you.

Thank you for allowing me to share my story and for all you're doing to truly change the world.