When I told Radim Malinic at the start of this episode that he’d been a role model of mine for a long time, I meant it, and I was nervous saying it out loud. He’s a designer, a writer, a speaker, he runs an agency, he hosts his own podcast, and he’s spent the last few years building a whole philosophy he calls Daring Creativity. What I didn’t expect was how much of our conversation would end up being about the opposite of all that output. The cost of it. The years he spent hiding inside the work.

This is one of the most honest conversations I’ve had on the show, and I’m grateful he was willing to have it.

What daring creativity actually means

I started where Radim starts most of his own guests: what is daring creativity? His answer has nothing to do with jumping out of planes. It’s the idea that you should pursue the things in life you’d otherwise regret, and that you can make incremental progress towards work you’re proud of without doing anything reckless. The thread running underneath it is something he kept returning to all conversation: the only person who makes the work happen is you. He calls it radical accountability. No one is coming to climb the mountain on your behalf.

He’s turning all of this into a trilogy of books, and he cheerfully admits he’s made the naming as confusing as possible. First comes Daring Forever, the manifesto, built around four chapters: permission, acceptance, curiosity, and gratitude. Then Daring Creativity, a summary of fifty conversations from his podcast. Then Forever Daring Humans, another fifty. He’s asked fifty guests what daring creativity means to them, and he told me no two people ever gave the same answer, because no two stories were the same. He even put the question to his own community, and found that when you ask people what they really stand for, they give you the most beautiful answer, even the ones he knows are quietly struggling. The mechanics of life just get in the way.

Becoming more of who you already are

Radim has a word for the thing he thinks matters most: singular. He got it from a video of Pharrell Williams listening to Maggie Rogers play her song Alaska, where Pharrell tells her, what you do is singular. For Radim, that’s the whole game. Stop measuring your work against everyone else’s. Stop asking whether the person next to you is doing better. Double down on what only you can make, and become more of who you already are, because everyone else is already taken.

It sounds simple. It took him most of his life to actually believe it.

Doing things before he knew how

One of the things that first drew me to Radim’s story is that he’s spent his whole life doing things before he knew how to do them. He joined an ice hockey team before he could skate. He started a band before he could play an instrument. He talked his way into DJing a club with no experience, just by saying the music was rubbish and asking if he could step up. He became a graphic designer before he knew anything about graphic design, started an agency without ever having worked in one, and wrote and sold books before he knew how to do either.

He calls this the space between now and how. Most people wait until they know how. Radim starts at now, and works the how out on the way. He’s honest that a kind of naive ignorance helped him. If he’d fully understood how hard any of it would be, he might have hesitated. Instead he kept stepping onto paths before he was ready and let the readiness catch up. He’s wary of the version of this that gets applauded online, people proudly saying they have no idea what they’re doing. He thinks it’s good to know a little. But he’s also landed somewhere generous about it: there’s real value in letting yourself find the unknown, as long as you’re safe enough in your own mind to go looking.

The immigrant who wanted to be John Smith

Radim grew up in what was then Czechoslovakia, in a small town in the northeast where, in his words, everyone he knew was a musician, an artist, or a drunk. He was a teenager in the nineties, surrounded by people chasing the things they saw working around them. When he moved to the UK, he didn’t feel like a creative imposter. He felt like a societal one. He wanted to blend in so badly that he says if he could have bought a perfect accent and the name John Smith, he’d have taken it on the spot.

What changed wasn’t other people accepting him. It was him accepting himself. He describes realising that the world he was quietly building, his singular world, was far more interesting than the one he was straining to fit into. People would tell him, you’ve done so well, coming to this country and building all this, and he learned to hear the backhanded edge in it and let it pass. Being accepted, he said, arrived the moment he stopped waiting for it from anyone else. I told him it was much the same for me, coming from a country that no longer exists, in the middle of a war, and finding that Spain was where I finally felt free to be myself. We agreed on the order of it. You accept yourself first, and the rest follows.

Crying in his birthday cake

This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to.

In his early thirties, Radim’s career took off properly. The work was good, the validation was constant, the awards and the talks and the visibility all kept arriving. And the busier he got, the less he had to deal with himself. He worked all the time. He told me he genuinely thought he was the happiest person in the world, and that he was crying into his birthday cake because he was so overworked, and he didn’t even know why he was doing any of it.

Creativity, for him, had become the perfect escape. If you keep pressing, he said, you keep moving further away from your problems. He’d always assumed his childhood was easy and free and stimulating, only to realise much later that there were elements of fear and pain woven through it that he’d been quietly hiding from his whole life. The work was the hiding place. The output was a way of not stopping long enough to feel anything.

Therapy at forty

Things only started making real sense for Radim around the age of forty. He’s forty-eight now, and he describes the four decades before that as beautiful chaos, but chaos all the same.

His first step into therapy wasn’t gentle or considered. He describes it as needing acute surgery on a problem. He was burnt out, running on caffeine and nothing else, and his anxieties had been turned up to eleven, to the point where he couldn’t cross the street without crying. In that first session, a cognitive behavioural one, the therapist asked him to break his life into a pie chart. Ninety-six per cent of it was work. He said, I’m a superstar. She said, can you see the problem here. He could, eventually.

He’s clear-eyed about how hard the idea of therapy is for people who grew up where he did. In the Eastern Bloc, he says, everyone’s normal and nobody needs therapy, and if you do need it, you must be properly crazy. He had to unlearn all of that. These days he does equine therapy, working through his problems alongside horses that, as he puts it, read your energy and won’t let you hide from your own nonsense. The session that surprised him most was about anger. He’d always believed he was a peaceful, happy person, and discovered how much anger he’d suppressed over the years, because he’d grown up around angry people and had always quietly assumed he was the problem.

Radical accountability

All of this feeds straight back into the philosophy. Radim quoted a line I wrote down the second he said it: the person who blames others has a long way to go, the person who blames themselves is halfway there, and the person who blames no one has arrived. Accept what you can change, accept what you can’t, and put your energy into the part that’s actually yours to move.

For Radim, that isn’t a productivity trick. It’s the thing that finally let him stop hiding. Once he understood himself, he had the space to understand other people, which is the whole reason he makes books and has conversations like this one. He even challenges the romance creatives wrap around their own work. One of his earlier books is called Creativity for Sale, because, as he put it, that’s ultimately what it is, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. What does help, he thinks, is getting people to say what they actually believe in, out loud, because that reaches people far beyond whether they happen to like your art.

One mountain at a time

I ended, as I’ve been ending a lot of episodes lately, by asking what he’d keep if he had to delete all of his work and leave just one thing. Radim said his new book, without hesitation, and then said he’d happily delete that too in five years, because by then he’ll be standing behind the next one. He sees every project as another mountain. You prepare for the setbacks, you ache on the way up, you sometimes want to turn around, and when you finally reach the summit you get to choose the next one.

The moment he’s in now, he told me, is exactly where he always wanted to be. He just never knew it would look like this. It’s not always easy, he said, but it’s hella worth it.

That felt like the right place to stop.

— Alen