Radim Malinic has been a role model of mine for years. He's a designer, a writer, a speaker, he runs the agency Brand Nu, he hosts his own podcast, and he's built a whole philosophy around the idea of daring creativity. I expected this conversation to be about all of that output. Instead it became one of the most honest talks I've had on the show, about the cost of the work and the years he spent hiding inside it.

He told me he once thought he was the happiest person in the world while crying into his birthday cake from overwork. We talked about creativity as escape, growing up in Czechoslovakia and wanting to blend in as an immigrant, reaching therapy at forty, and the philosophy he built out of all of it: become more of who you already are, because everyone else is taken.

In this episode:

• What daring creativity actually means
• Becoming "singular" and refusing to compare yourself
• Doing things before he knew how, an agency before he'd ever worked in one
• The immigrant who wanted to be called John Smith
• Looking like the happiest person in the world while burning out
• Creativity as a way to hide from himself
• Reaching therapy at forty, and unlearning the stigma he grew up with
• Radical accountability and the anger he didn't know he had
• Why he'd happily delete all his work and start the next mountain

Find Radim here:

• Website: https://radimmalinic.co.uk/
• Podcast: https://radimmalinic.co.uk/podcast/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radim.malinic/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandnu/

Find me here:

• captnoffscript.com
• @captnoffscript

This week's Friday bonus: Radim and I go deep on fear, why you can't unlearn it, and why your brain treats sharing your work with strangers like a sabre-tooth tiger in the bushes. It goes to newsletter subscribers first, a week before it's public. Subscribe at https://captn.myflodesk.com/newsletter.

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