When building our creative careers, we often navigate without a map, unsure where to begin or how to achieve lasting success. Radim Malinic, a beacon in the creative world, aims to change that with his latest books, Creativity For Sale and Mindful Creative, offering a much-needed blueprint for aspiring creatives everywhere.
Malinic, who leads the London-based Brand Nu Studio and Brand Nu Books, has dedicated over two decades to helping fellow creatives forge successful paths. His previous releases, such as Book of Branding and Book of Ideas, have received widespread acclaim. They are essential resources for entrepreneurs, designers, and brand creators.
Creativity For Sale is a comprehensive guide for artists, writers, designers, and other creatives who want to ignite successful careers and businesses. It offers practical strategies for building and amplifying personal brands and provides powerful tools for meaningful growth.
On the other hand, Mindful Creative offers a roadmap for navigating the peaks and troughs of creative life, career, and business. It encourages readers to reflect on building positive habits and focusing on mindfulness. Through sharing his hard-learned lessons, Malinic provides valuable insights that have transformed his own career and life.
In line with his commitment to sustainability, both books are printed by Park Communications in London, using 100% offshore wind electricity from UK sources. The production process emphasizes environmental responsibility, utilizing vegetable oil-based inks, recycling 95% of press chemicals, and achieving an average recycling rate of 99% for associated waste. The paper is sourced from well-managed, FSC®-certified forests, ensuring the books are certified climate-neutral print products with calculated and offset carbon emissions.
Enthralled with the idea of injecting mindfulness into hectic creative pursuits and navigating chaotic agency life, Radim and I discussed what it means to be a mindful creative and how to build out a toolkit for the 21st-century designer. Our conversation, edited for clarity and length, is below.
I love that both new titles aim to help creatives find success in their career while also avoiding burnout. What I found particularly interesting in Mindful Creative was about mood and flow states. What did you observe in the industry and perhaps your career that compelled you to write about this topic?
These two books are the books that I wish existed 20 years ago when I was starting out. We start our creative careers because we want to do the thing, and we don’t necessarily think about what else we must do to help ourselves actually survive it. It’s like wanting to be a runner; if you go running 5K, 10K, 15K every day, you’re going to start hurting because you need to do all sorts of other things to help you be better at running.
Creativity is meant to be a beautiful topic that makes us feel something and gives us our livelihood. The creative industry can have such a narrow focus that only when things go bad do we start thinking, well, why us? Why now?
I think there is a reason why we sometimes need to burn out to find where the happy middle is. As much as we want creativity to be 100% amazing all the time, it will never be because we are not 100% all the time. It’s understanding how to be okay when we’re not okay and how to look out for others when they’re not okay.
We’ve chosen creativity as our livelihood and profession. And it has so many variables. We must grow, learn, and develop resilience. And we don’t talk about it enough.
In our last conversation, you brought up the idea of facilitating a 21st-century designer toolkit, hoping that your recent books could be part of that toolkit. What tools do 21st-century designers need and why? How does this differ from the needs of the 20th-century designer?
When you look back, there was a lot of focus on being skilled in a certain way to deliver the work. Companies like Adobe, for example, still focus on helping you to make the thing.
Looking at the 20th-century toolkit, there were design education and software skills, but we missed the soft skills. Where would you put mental health or mindfulness into those layers?
A friend of mine summarized our creative work in the early 2000s by saying, it was get the work done or get the sack. The world was much more cutthroat, cynical, and driven for results.
From what I’ve experienced, people didn’t care if you had troubles or weren’t particularly well; it was “you’ve got an hour lunch break. This is the work that needs to be done. This is the job, go.”
It did not stimulate creativity or discussion. It only added to the percentage of people in our industry who are unhappy. When you look at the statistics, 55% of people in the creative industry are unhappy.
We’re meant to be the unicorns, with fairy dust and sunshine all the time, and it’s not. Why is that?
We try to adopt old ways of creative working and adapt them to new projects and generations, and nothing improves. As a society, everything is moving much faster, especially now, with more knowledge, understanding, and resources. Small tweaks can actually create big results, but most people don’t think about it.
I wrote Mindful Creative because I have lived every sort of creative life and career, from freelancing professional to running my own studio. What burned me out was the fact that I could work every hour of every day.
I reaped the benefits of a more connected, democratized world, which was amazing. But I had no definition of when to stop. For me, creativity was an untamed beast because you can work as long as you want. At the time when I was pushing myself so much, I had a commission for the Canadian launch of Bacardi Breezers. And I told myself, I will make this the most amazing work of my life. There was no need. I just needed to answer the brief and do my best work. I didn’t have to stay up for long hours, but the social media cocktail and the number of followers drove me.
The 20th century was much simpler. We had portfolio books; there weren’t personal websites. Creatives didn’t have to consider making reels. In the 21st century, we have created a much more content-rich and opportunity-rich world. There’s more work than ever before. But we’ve added so many layers that it’s really hard to understand how to operate through those layers.
How do you navigate everything that’s around you? How do you cherry-pick what’s good for you or what can be good for you? And how do you stay true to yourself?
And that is hard to do, especially when you have an immature mind because you feel like you’re falling behind. So many things in our daily lives make us feel inadequate because we’re questioning, am I good enough creatively? Have I got the right idea? Am I doing enough? Am I promoting enough? Do I have enough likes?
Some people pretend that they’re okay and that they’re flashy and going somewhere. But if you don’t have a signposted purpose of where you want to be with your career, then you will do all those things I did 10 or 15 years ago. Going after every platform, every like, every follower, every piece of work, every client, everything.
When I look back, I can’t remember, apart from the Bacardi Breezer campaign, what I did 15 years ago. And I can’t pinpoint why I was working so much that I broke myself. There are no gold medals to win. I was working for something, towards some big picture, but I didn’t have to do all of that.
I needed to discover why I was doing certain things because the work was just a tool. The work enabled workaholic behaviors. We hide in our work behind instant gratification. We take on more because it pushes the pain away and it pushes our reality away.
Our creative lives were simpler before the Internet and social media. Now, we must be like an octopus with eight limbs trying to juggle many things. A 21st-century designer toolkit also implies adaptability to rapidly evolving technologies and trends. How do you stay current with tools and techniques while fostering balance to avoid burnout?
We can do many more things we couldn’t do in the past. I remember having a fantastic conversation with someone who used to be an illustrator for Gucci. His career sounded amazing, but having a linear career is rarer today. I enjoy that I could have reinvented my career five or six times in the last 20 to 25 years. My general curiosity has always led me to ask, what’s next? What’s that? What’s this?
Because the world is so multi-layered, you can do all these incredible things. And that was impossible before, you know? Today, if you have a problem, you can find a way to solve it yourself.
Compared to working for others, running your own show is much more demanding but so much more enriching when you find your own solutions.
Let’s say I’m launching a new coffee company. There are resources at my fingertips to learn processes from stock fulfillment to building creative assets. But possibilities and more opportunities come at a price. The world is heavier than ever before. Our brains have to catch up. What was available to us ten years ago differed from five years, three years, even a year ago. That is really fast. And we have yet to process some of the stuff we did 20 years ago, let alone, you know, what’s happening now.
With emerging technologies now, especially AI or blockchain, do you see these tools as means to empower designers to create more sustainably? Or, like you mentioned, does this add to the world’s heaviness?
It comes from within. Let’s say you are good at tennis. You have a good serve. You know how to hit that sweet spot every time. But to get to that point, you need time to develop. In creativity, you can be on the pitch just because you’ve got the right software, even if you don’t have years of development. Once you’ve had some practice, the heaviness of life comes from every angle.
Years of experience teach us how to deal with the other side of everything we wish for. We don’t always talk about it, but there is a dark side to creativity, entrepreneurship, freelancing, or running a studio. We need to talk about both sides so that people can prepare for all kinds of situations.
When it comes to new tools like AI, we panic because it’s not a piece of shit tool anymore. We ask ourselves, is it going to hurt my business? Because I have grown my roots and gone through many experiences, I don’t get so worked up about potential threats.
So, consider which part of AI is a threat to your business. There are parts of AI that can replace me in various ways. But can it really? You need someone to operate the AI. It’s human-enabled to give you a result. We’ve had AI in our lives for a while. AI takes a few bits and bobs and creates a collage from it or another solution. We’ve been doing this in Photoshop for the last 30 years.
When photography came out, painters were upset. You no longer have to paint the landscape because you can take a picture. So the painters moved on to Cubism. AI gives us a challenge and a kick up the ass to do better. It has given us this sort of steroid, hyper, turbo, creative calculator that you can use to see what you can do with it, you know?
If you don’t have a mindful, emotionally mature foundation, that’s when you feel a threat from something like AI. When it comes to high-end creativity, the market still and will always appreciate experts, talent, specialists, and professionals.
It’s the idea of using AI in the ways we need to. There are still photographers and painters. Both are equally valuable. There’s just a slight shift in how they are utilized.
I believe that AI is here to stay. We should think about how to use AI to our advantage because, like the tools you have in Photoshop, it can save you hours. It used to take me two or three hours to retouch an image, but with content-aware fill, it takes ten seconds. And it’s done really well—in fact, impressively.
It’s more about the functionality of our tools, rethinking ideas, or combining ideas we’ve always had.
We need to get it right for legal purposes and implications. It’s evolving too fast for our collective consciousness. Sometimes, technological advances that take time feel less ominous. But AI has been around for quite a long time; we just relabeled it (Grammarly is an example, and we’ve been fine using it as such).
In the latest episode of the Creativity for Sale podcast, you talked with Mike Schnaidt, the creative director of Fast Company, discussing his career and the process of writing his book, Creative Endurance. My big takeaway was how vital endurance is to the creative process. It takes time to find your rhythm and make sense of your work. But staying committed and continuing to learn and grow is essential. How do you approach cultivating creative endurance in the digital age when flashing lights and alarms seem to be everywhere?
Endurance is something that we don’t necessarily think that we might need as creatives.
When you think of great designers—they are the ones that produce great work seemingly all the time—their careers are all about endurance. Paula Sher, for example.
When you see your peers doing amazing things, it’s easy to sit on your hands and say, yeah, I’m not going to do that. Creative pressure, or what I call ambitious anxiety, is prevalent; not only do you want to do more than you’ve ever been able to do, but you want to do them now.
Preferences become important when you realize it’s impossible to do it all. How do you choose what’s good for you? It takes time to find out because, at first, you want to do everything all the time.
Mike said it beautifully: It’s the understanding of how we can actually come back another day, how we can continue to move forward.
I had to follow the advice of my books and simplify because I was running a successful studio, but it was making me unhappy because I couldn’t do all of it. I couldn’t be the brain for another three or four people every day, plus be a dad to my family and try to write books. I wasn’t necessarily looking after myself. So, it was about simplifying.
It’s taken all those iterations of my life and creativity to make every mistake and realize that I’m not the only person doing this. Whatever you do, someone else has done it before. It’s about being honest about everything that we do.
Aside from allowing yourself a couple of decades to figure this out, what advice do you have for creatives just starting their careers to cultivate resilience and endurance in their creative practice?
Make a plan about how you will look after yourself and build your personal and creative toolkits. Creatives around my age never made that a priority. Ask yourself: What do I do that stops me from greatness?
What makes you unique? Everyone has a creative journey. What is your creative and personal foundation? There’s no single correct answer to this. It’s about trying to be less of everything and focusing on your creativity, not on pleasing the algorithm.
Looking after your soul will help you lessen the need to connect with hundreds and thousands of people. Focusing on your circle of friends or clients will get you further because you’re working with people who actually understand you and know how you communicate.
Imagery courtesy of Radim Malinic.