Widely considered the greatest movie actress of all time, Meryl Streep is best known to millions as the cold-blooded Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, and now she’s back in the role in The Devil Wears Prada 2.
With three Oscars under her belt and a career spanning five decades, she’s always spoken about life and work with a rare and refreshing honesty. Here are some lessons from the woman herself.
Meryl Streep’s belief: Always work with your heart
In a 2008 interview with Good Housekeeping, Meryl was asked about her secret to a purposeful career. Her answer was suspiciously simple. “Incorporate what you believe in into every area of your life. Take your heart to work and demand the best and the best from everyone else as well,” she said.
For someone who has played queens, bosses, editors, and everything in between, the lesson was clear: No role, no job, and no day is halfway worthy of showing up.
Full presence is the only way I knew how to do it.
Meryl Streep on finding your own way: Ignore everyone
Speaking at Vassar College in 1983, Merrill offered advice that was remarkably outdated. “The choice between the devil and the dream comes up every day in different little masks,” she told the graduating class, adding that her advice was always to look at the dilemma head-on and decide what you can live with.
It’s the kind of lesson that applies to every career, every crossroads, and every moment when the easier path is tempting but the right path is not.
Meryl Streep says: The minute you care about what other people think, you lose yourself
This was one of her most direct and persistent observations, which she shared across multiple interviews throughout her career. “The moment you start caring what other people think is the moment you stop being yourself,” she said. For someone who had been in the public eye for more than five decades, it was a conviction she kept returning to time and time again.
Meryl Streep on embracing change: Nothing is normal
In her commencement speech at Barnard College in 2010, Merrill delivered a line that has stuck with people ever since. “This is your time, and it is normal for you, but in reality, nothing is normal. There is only change, resistance to it, and then more change,” she told the graduating class. It was a reminder that certainty is an illusion and that the only real skill worth building is the ability to keep moving forward through uncertainty.
Coming from someone who had already reinvented herself multiple times by that point, she landed with real weight.
