Maria Popova

**Maria Popova** (0:01)
I think the self is such a tedious place. We live in it, and especially in our culture, where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.
On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a wide-ranging conversation with Maria Popova about science and poetry, about how to make meaning in an indifferent universe, and about the value of dreaming.

**Maria Popova** (0:51)
How incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible.

**Debbie Millman** (0:58)
Maria Popova is a writer and reader who was born and raised in Bulgaria during the final years of communism. At 19, she immigrated alone to the United States, worked multiple jobs while attending the University of Pennsylvania, and began sending a weekly email to a handful of friends, containing the most interesting things she had discovered that week. That email eventually became Brain Pickings, which became The Marginalian, one of the most beloved and enduring literary and philosophical projects on the Internet. For two decades, Maria has devoted herself to tracing the connections between science and poetry, astronomy and love, nature and consciousness, all while building a body of work animated by wonder and rigor.
She is the author of Figuring, Traversal, The Universe in Verse, and several beautiful children's books. Threaded through all of her work is a sustained meditation on attention, wonder, and what it means to be fully alive. Maria Popova, welcome back to Design Matters.

**Maria Popova** (2:06)
How wonderful and strange to be back here some 15 years later.

**Debbie Millman** (2:11)
Yes, yes, our first interview was back in 2012
And in that conversation, we talked quite a bit about your origin story. So I want to encourage people to listen to that, to hear all about how you first became you.
But I still want to touch on some things about your early life that I didn't ask you about earlier, before we talk about all you've done since.

**Maria Popova** (2:35)
Well, first of all, I should probably listen, because we become in every retelling of who we are, right?

**Debbie Millman** (2:40)
This is true, this is true. So our avid listeners can go back and compare.
In our first conversation on Design Matters, you described creativity as combinatorial, and I've talked about that many, many times on the show since, with lots and lots of different people, the gathering and recombination of experiences, ideas, and memories into something new. All these years later, I feel that this is not just a creative methodology for you, it feels more like a world view.

**Maria Popova** (3:12)
Hmm. To the extent that the world is only rendered real in the mind, it is a mind view, meaning it is how I experience my own mind working. I think most of our minds work that way naturally, and when we are able to kind of perceive the process, we call it creativity, this kind of aggregation, this kind of combination that is creation.

**Debbie Millman** (3:40)
You've written so beautifully about wonder throughout your work, but I'm curious about your earliest encounters with it. What first astonished you as a child?

**Maria Popova** (3:54)
You know, it's interesting. Wonder is one of those things that is so elemental and so universal, you might actually miss it, meaning you might experience it, but not know what it is. And I certainly didn't have the word for it until only recently, looking back on my life and seeing that common denominator.
I don't have many early childhood memories, but the ones that I do have all have an element of being very present in a moment in time, usually in the natural world, and this feeling of a great peace and a great surprise at the same time. And to me, that is wonder.

**Debbie Millman** (4:34)
Mm, I love that, I haven't really thought about it in that way.
Your website, Brain Pickings, the original name, began as a weekly email to seven or eight friends while you were working at a creative agency in Philadelphia. At the time, did it feel more like an act of generosity, or self-education, or survival?

**Maria Popova** (5:02)
Well, it was a total act of hubris, actually.

**Debbie Millman** (5:06)
I hadn't considered that one.

**Maria Popova** (5:08)
I mean, the shortest version is that I had come to the US, sold on the promise of liberal arts education, which I thought was going to teach me how to live. And my family cobbled together the fortune, the great fortune of $800 that was supposed to last me through the first year.