Dare to act now (Today is the best day there is) - Haraldur Thorleifsson

0:11I've met a lot of people who believe that they're not creative, but I've never met a person who's not creative. And then the second part of this is I think all creativity is connected. There is the beginning steps where you don't know where you're going, where you have all the doubt. There is the middle part where you have something but you're not sure if it's any good. and then there's the end part when you release it and it's different to what you expected. Everyone goes through the same journey. And I think as an extension of the fact that everyone's creative, I think we also have this narrative that everyone should be, that everyone, whatever their creative journey is, that's the extent of their creativity.

0:51And I think everyone, once you learn the creative process, I think you can apply it to all sorts of different things.

1:02Welcome to the Daring Creativity Podcast, a show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection. It's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. It's about becoming more of who you already are. My name is Radim Malinic. I'm a designer, author, and eternally curious human being. I am talking to a broad range of guests who share their stories of small actions that sparked lifetime discoveries, taking one step towards the thing that made them feel most alive. Let me begin this episode with a question. Are you ready to discover what happens when you dare to create?

1:49Today I'm speaking with Halli Thorlifsson, who shares his extraordinary creative journey from the Icelandic music scene through design, agency leadership and unconventional projects and entrepreneurship. In our conversation, we talked about him growing up in Iceland's small generalist culture, where he learned early that everyone is creative and all creativity is connected. Living with muscular dystrophy, Halley embodies the philosophy that today is the best day there is, which is a mindset that has driven him to create without waiting for permission. From managing 100 plus employees to designing dreamlike physical spaces and launching a walking podcast, Halley demonstrates how adaptability, resilience and refusing to quit transforms doubt into work only you could create.

2:38It's my pleasure to share with you my conversation with Hallie Thorlifson.

2:49Hallie, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here today. Thank you so much. How's it going? So you use this, is it a joke? but your full name when you pronounce it you say have i pronounced it correctly yeah well yes my full name is harold in kitholevson okay so i hope i'm pronouncing that correctly because nobody does so for those who might struggle to pronounce your name hopefully not be able to pronounce your shorter version of your name how would you introduce yourself so yeah well the shorter version of my name the one i use for iceland is hannley and i've been in a creative field for most of my adult life i've worked on a lot of different types of projects starting off in in digital design branding product design and then once i founded my company and then sold my company i i started doing other things that were on the backboard while i was running or was a digital agency and those things are pretty varied but they're the belief that all creativity is connected and i'm trying to prove that out through my life tell me about where did your creativity sort of first passed your consciousness i was actually thinking about this earlier because I'm going to Copenhagen soon to talk to Lego and some of the people there and I think one of the first memories I have of feeling like I could create something was actually Lego and Lego then was I think a little bit different than Lego now and that there weren't these huge kits it was just these bricks and you could build anything and I just remember sitting four hours and building cities or cars or whatever it was.

4:50And my mom was an artist and a costume designer. So I also remember just sitting with her as she was drawing. I spent time with her and watching her work and understanding that and kind of realizing from her that you don't really need much to create. You know, she was the kind of person that was able to create anything from nothing. I think a lot of moms are like that and maybe parents now, but those, I think, were the first sparks for me of understanding that life is made up. Everything around us is made by people and we're able to influence our environment. Your mom, being a costume designer, what sort of work was she producing?

5:36and she worked in mostly in theater and then later in tv and films started off though in sort of more commercial things but was drawn to the theater and spent i i spent a lot of time in theaters see my parents got divorced when i was young and she married an actor and so i just remember spending a lot of time behind the scenes in a theater and watching how things get made and how make-believe works i wanted to know population of iceland compared to anywhere else is tiny how does it even work because when i look at it like currently your population is about just below 400 000 people that's like a couple of districts in london and to have almost people assign this is a most ridiculously naive question but how easy difficult are the opportunities to create something and to have enough people to actually show up for it at that time or even now i think there is a lot of opportunity to create in iceland partly because of the size of the population you're able to get involved in all sorts of creative ventures without really knowing anything because you just they just need people and i think that what that breeds in general is There's a lot of generalists in Iceland, people that are able to do multiple things decently well.

7:07And also with the population, we have a surprising amount of media. And so that means they constantly need content. And so if you have something that you want to promote, it's very easy to promote it at a fairly national level and get the word out really quick. We still kind of live in this world, although it's obviously been broken down as it has everywhere, where if something is on TV, most people know about it. I find it fascinating absolutely fascinating but what I find I think even more fascinating when you said that everyone's a generalist that mindset must be a way of intrigue that you hear about so many Icelandic stories about people who are polymaths of things that they do that come from this culture and from this society where you actually have to find a way of looking around the corners because people need you yeah and I remember when I started working as a designer outside of Iceland.

8:12In Iceland, I'm not trained as a designer. I was working for companies here in Iceland, and my job as a designer at that point wasn't well-defined. I felt that everything was my responsibility. Everything from just coming up with the concept, the idea, the branding, the copy, the selling it through, getting developers involved, producing it. It was all what I was supposed to do. And then when I moved to America, it took me a while to realize that's definitely not how things work there, where people are extremely specialized and you have a person that's very good at each of those five or 10 things that I just listed.

9:04And that's the team that you get to work with. And with that comes, there's a lot of benefit to that, but also I do think there's a lot of benefit to at least understanding all aspects of the project and understanding what everyone does, at least at a surface level, understanding how they do it and what they need to do. i think i as a fellow journalist would fully understand the curiosity behind because you can't teach people to to want to be curious and actually want to know everything and sometimes this comes to you as for example comes to you comes to me and lots of other journalists that is the situation you have to work out all those let's say 12 steps between a to z and you have to do it and make it and you become more than just a creative become a producer let's say music a producer who knows how to direct the engineer to get the best sound of the drums how to get the best sound of the guitar amp how to do this how to make sure that conceptually it works and then you get the session musician in order to do the guitarist like just to play a solo and all right goodbye we needed you for a minute whereas you feel like a producer you've got job for life because there is all other ways of applying yourself i think that being able to adapt is very important in what is for the world that's coming, because we don't really know how it's going to change.

10:23We do know that it's going to change pretty drastically. And I think about this a lot, even for my children now, is that what do you teach kids? What is it that is important? And I think adaptability and resilience is the main thing that you want to make sure that people have in a future that's so uncertain. world. You said your parents divorced, your mom married an actor. You got to see her now working for the world of film, theater, TV. Where do we draw the dots now from her work and you wanted to go and pursue music or explore music and creativity? How much music played part in your life? I lost my mom when I was young.

11:06I was 11 when she died. And even before that, and for a long time, even into my teenage years, not related to that, but I didn't really like music. I didn't understand why people listened to it. It was just this noise to me, and I think I related it. There was a lot of... I had young parents, both my mom and dad were very young when they had me, and I think I related it just to partying, and I didn't really enjoy it. And especially my dad played and plays guitar, and I used to hate it when he played. It really annoyed me when I heard him play. And so when I was maybe 16, 17, I started playing around with his guitar and that's the first time I really started to enjoy music and then fell very deeply in love with it.

11:59And very quickly after I started playing guitar, I started to write music and I felt that I was, I just I enjoyed it so much and I had books and books of songs that I wrote going back to when I was maybe 16 17 and for about five or six years that's as I was going through university that's what I that was my creative outlet that was the way that I expressed things like my through my first relationship, expressing affection or love and then sorrow for some of the things that I've gone through. And it was a way for me to put something out there. And music is strange. I think it lives apart from every other art form in that it's very hard to pinpoint what it is about it that works or doesn't work.

12:53And how it affects you is so deeply personal. So I just loved writing music, but then I was way too shy to perform. The only way that I could perform it for anyone was if I drank a lot. And back to the earlier point about alcoholism, I could not get on stage without being bored and I'm blackout drunk. I wanted to know how this cathartic process of songwriting, how did it make you feel and how much did it potentially help you with processing the grief of losing your mom because that's such a monumental event in anyone's life and sometimes the things like alcohol music always like escapism go hand in hand when the grief is unresolved we'll be back after a quick break this episode is brought to you by lax coffee co the first creative speciality coffee company, building a platform to shine the light on emerging global talent with a mission to make a positive impact on a creative industry and beyond.

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14:32Yeah, I mean, going back and starting there, I was 11 years old and I'm born in 1977. So this was in 88. And at that time, especially in Iceland, there was nobody to help you process something like that. I remember I went to see one priest for about what I remember as being about maybe a 15-minute conversation. And that was it in terms of any kind of grief counseling. And my dad was 33 when this happened. And I'm 48 now. And I have no idea how I would help my kids through this. And he clearly had no idea how he could help me through this. Not through any fault of his own. and there was no nobody no specialists to really help directors so it all got buried and i didn't want to talk about it i didn't want to think about it and it was very one of my main coping mechanisms was just burying everything and that's where i think when i drank i got very sad because that's when i couldn't hold it back and that's where all the things came back but it It still felt good to at least try and touch it in some way.

15:46And then the music was maybe a more healthy way to deal with this, where I had to sit down and think about it. And I wrote a lot of songs about her and have written many, many songs about her and in different ways. I think they've all helped me at least understand how I was feeling. Because if you're that young and you don't know how to deal with it and you try and bury everything, it doesn't stay buried. It just stays somewhere right underneath the surface. And you feel all the things, but you just don't understand what you feel. Do you feel that with the loss of your parent, one of your parents and your dad being at the young age of 33, we both know what we felt like when we were 33, I think as you quite maturely and quite wisely said, when you were 33, you wouldn't know how to help somebody who was 11.

16:37because I think especially in 1988 and I'm only a year younger than you I'm very much related to certain things I relate to certain things like how the system was just non-existent for site support so when you talk about this happening so young do you feel like you had to grow up slightly faster than your peers and so did you feel like you had to almost look after your dad or do you feel like you had to grow beyond your years because that's a monumental event that puts you on a different parallel to your peers. Well, I think when something like this happens, and it did for me, I think you grow up very fast in certain areas, and certain areas get stifled.

17:22And you're not as emotionally developed as other people. But one of the things that I definitely felt was I was so afraid of losing my father that I became an unknown or a caretaker for him. Not that he asked for it, not that he maybe even realized it, but I was always looking at his behavior and wondering if any of it could lead to him passing on as well. And that became a very sort of a big part of me was trying to make sure that my dad stayed alive. You think that your transition into creative work, design work was a another form of escapism did you feel that or was it more from the point of curiosity or maybe both i think definitely both i think there is when i first got into it i was at university i was studying i started off studying philosophy and then i went into it felt like i needed something practical so i started to learn finance and there was a course there which was i think it was called IT 101 or something like that.

18:32And it was again, I'm showing my age here. This would have been in 1997 and the internet was fairly young. And one week our assignment was you should create a website. Creating a website at that point was fairly complicated to compare to what it is now, but it was a very simple website. You just, you write your name, you put your phone number and I can't remember. It's some little bit of information about yourself. And then you could post it on the university website. And that was the first time I really understood the internet has been around for a little bit, but not that long. And I really understood I can put anything out here.

19:16And in theory, even though nobody sees it, in theory, everyone can see it. And that to me was a big thing, a big revelation of just, I can make something and in the comfort of my, which is different than music. I can make something in the comfort of my home and in front of my screen. I can put it out there and other people can see it. When you said I studied philosophy and I needed something more practical, which was finance, literally it put a huge smile on my face because i love those totally unrelated topics that are so connected to creativity so connected whereas there's not many famous philosophy companies not hiring at any point there's more finance companies but it i love joining these doors how it puts you on the path to what you did next because yeah that early hdml code which all of a sudden works you're like oh my gosh like first be coded hello to show up on screen look i did that and then your geo city isn't kind of stuff like you can actually put your website first up there and then everything grows from there so how do we go from the first rudimentary website on your university server to you starting your design agency uno well very quickly this is the first year second year university first year in finance, this was when I took that course and very quickly realized this.

20:47I enjoyed it and I was relatively good at it. And so I started, I think within months of that, I started doing projects for other people and other companies. And I grew up, we did not have a lot of money. And so it was how I sustained myself and supported myself while I was at university. So I was doing this, these odd jobs as a designer slash developer is a stretch, but still I would design these sites and basically in code. And I was able to make money out of it. I was able to do this for other people. I enjoyed that a lot. And so very quickly that became one of the potential career paths for me, even though I was still at the university and I finished ultimately finished the separate degrees of philosophy and finance for them.

21:42And again, then I wanted to do even something more practical, so I went for my master's degree in economics. But I realized at some point I was enjoying the science thing, and I was, maybe more importantly at that point, I was able to make money from it. I was able to pay the bills. And started doing that more and more. ultimately got to the point where I applied for a job at an agency that I looked up to tremendously that I don't know how I even thought about applying because it felt so far out of reach and that was in New York, it was called Cupid Council and they had I just had everyone as a client, even though they were small every big company and so I somehow got that job, moved to New York and started working with them.

22:36New York was maybe too big of a leap for me at that point. I'd only lived to Iceland and I fell into debauchery. But I went back to Iceland, kept working with these big clients, and ultimately that led to, after, I don't know, seven or eight years of freelancing, that led to me starting my agency. Oh, I know. I always ask people who are in a similar story, what was the jump and what was the in that like how did you handle the inevitable step into the leadership role because there's always a common answer and that is often yeah not very well so how was that journey for you i did not i had never been a manager to anyone when i started the agency.

23:26I had managed projects, and I think I had a pretty good handle on how to manage projects because as a freelancer, I was starting to take on bigger and bigger projects that needed a lot of different people, but I was not a capable people manager, and that took me a long time to get any kind of grasp on because that's a very different skill set. And going back to what I said earlier, I just assumed that everyone was like me. And so everyone needed the same things that I did and everyone had the same experiences that I had. And I was always frustrated when people didn't do what I would have done, even though I never explained what I wanted them to do.

24:12I just assumed that they would get it. And so that took me a long time. And I, at one point I had three executive coaches, three people that were trying to helped me become a bad manager because the agency was growing so fast that I was, it's very different to also be a manager of three people to 20 people to 50 people or 70 or a hundred. And you have middle managers and then senior people and all you're learning different skills along the way. Tell me more about how did you get in to get three executive coaches? Did somebody tell you, Holly, you need some help or do you go, I think I'm fucking up.

24:51I need some help. I can't remember. Probably somebody told me that I can't remember how it started, but I started with one. It was never, the intention was not, let's go with three. I started with one. That person was very good at the emotional side of things. He was very attuned to people, but he wasn't very structured. And so I added another one who was, she had a PhD in psychology and could help me maybe put form to a lot of these things. And then the third one was kind of a mix between an executive coach and a therapist for me because a lot of the things that you see from executives or anyone is they haven't worked out their own stuff.

25:37And so I had to deal with some of my own problems as well. I like that you said, I assumed that everyone was like me. Everyone knew the same thing as me. And it's such an easy assumption to make because when you think and almost give people the benefit of the doubt, when you think better of them, the canvas is blank. That's an open playing field because it's often the people who think that everyone else is ambitious or everyone else is clued up. And because that's how you see the world and that's how you wish to see the world also existed. it when you come to a realization that oh no no one's as ambitious as me or i'm ambitious in my own way i'm doing things my own way and you almost think i'm seeing people through the wrong lens thinking they should be just like me if not better only to realize oh you know what it's okay for them to be who they are and i can really feel for what you're saying like because i've been in a similar place not with 100 employees but with the live stories where you really want for people to do well and achieve something and they go no i'm happy to be here like how does that work because you can't process it right is there any particular sort of standout findings from those coaching sessions that you still carry till today with meeting people where they are working from there I think is very important.

27:05And so understanding what motivates this person, what is it that they want to achieve, and then realizing sometimes that matches or can match with where we're going as a company or as a team. And sometimes it doesn't. And that doesn't have to be the fault of anyone. It just doesn't work. And so making sure that you're building a cohesive culture is extremely important. That doesn't mean that everyone is the same person. It means that there are core values, though, that you're aiming for that we're all aligned on, to a degree at least and if the people that come in that don't fit in it's better for everyone if they move out sooner rather than later because they won't be happy the team around them won't be happy and ultimately it can break if you persist because it for the longest time i felt i can change these people i can change who they are and i can so despite evidence the contrary i would keep people on that weren't a good fit and again realizing it wasn't that they were bad people that they weren't qualified they just didn't fit into what we were doing such a beautiful thing to say i wanted to change people because you're doing it with the right heart the right mindset the right ambition and the right empathy but no one can be helped if they don't want to help themselves yeah and again maybe they didn't need help maybe they were fine they just that's this isn't the place for them at that situation a lot of people in a creative roles almost are dreading to become a manager or dread to grow and stay small for the reason that they want to stay connected to the creativity how did that work for you because obviously you were from a freelance role now running a giant agency with 100 plus people were you still connected to creativity or were you just there to solve the problems and make sure that the ship should stay steady and flows and sells?

29:19Definitely there were times when I was more connected and times when I was less connected were times when there was a needed to focus on more operational things. But my goal was always to find people to run the operations so that I could focus on what I thought what I was best at, which was running the creative teams. and then as a side well as very connected to that is is running the sort of the relationship with the customer because understanding what they're looking for helps tremendously in leading the creative work and so towards the end before i sold my agency i was we were getting into a pretty good groove where I felt like I was splitting my time fairly well between the things that I was good at.

30:13And I had a senior team that was qualified and able to execute on a very high level on all the different things that an agency has to do. I was never, almost never the creative director on a project. My job was to review the work maybe once a week, twice a week with the creative director and be in touch with the client and understanding if there was a misalignment and helping the course correct if there was as soon as possible without taking control away from the creative director which was a delicate dance speaking of a delicate dance the way you got to the position where you got there at the agency then you sold the agency to a known global platform twitter at that time what was it like to become a part of a bigger machine and almost have your role changed how much autonomy did you retain or how much was it about a change that was you no longer were sort of working for outside clients in the way you used to be and everything's changed so we all have this what's called muscle memory like we used to work in a certain way for years and years and everything then changes how did you adapt to it how did you find those changes because which you were tasked with certain roles for Twitter to bring it to the younger audience, you're doing certain things in a different way.

31:36How was it for you? Because was it a kind of radical change that you had to adapt to? How was it? It was very hard. It was a very hard transition. It took me a long time to get to the point where I felt comfortable in the role that I had. And it was a very stark difference in terms of role, in terms of culture, in terms of my ability to influence things. And so that was a very hard transition and it took me a long time to adapt to that and learning different tools and different ways of working. I think it was very helpful for me in general after the fact, but at the time it felt pretty bad. You mentioned no influence, because everything's changed.

32:25at what time if at all a regret comes into situation it or does it not i think regret depends on how you use that word i think you can't change the past so you can't really go back and there was no point in me thinking a lot about should i have done this i knew the reasons i did it and they still held, even though it turned out a little bit differently than I expected, probably because I was maybe naive. It still felt like at the time it was the right decision. And so I didn't have regret in that way. But it was definitely, I mean, I had a lot of moments where I felt I don't really like this. I don't really like this feeling.

33:16I don't really like what I'm doing. But I was trying to reshape that feeling into the fact that I don't like it means that there's something for me to learn here. And I've made this choice. This is what I'm doing. The best thing for me to do right now is use this as a way to learn new things and learn new skills. Because I think you can get, regret can drown you. And you can become bitter. That's a very bad place to be. um you are no longer employed by twitter and most of the world knows about it because you had a high profile conversation with your employer in the public realm and then you left if i could ask you just how you felt when it was all finished this chapter of your life was done and it's provided you as you just said with lots of things that you've learned about it's helped you to grow as as a creative, as a person, as a human.

34:14And then there's this, let's say, storm in a teacup almost. It seemed massive on the outside, like having seen it play out in real life, well, in front of our eyes on Twitter. Then it becomes BBC News. It becomes everything because of the other person. When it all died down, which I hope it has done, how do you look back at all of this? What do you leave behind and what do you take forward? it well it happened very fast i've been on twitter for so long that i've been in so many different heated debates on twitter that prepared me for that moment that it wasn't in the moment it didn't feel that big and after the fact i felt i felt proud of how i handled it and i felt i did the best i could under that in that situation and it resolved itself in a way that i was satisfied with and so I don't regret anything that I did there and I feel made the right choices in a pretty heated moment and again it taught me a lot about who I am and who I can be in that situation and I think there were so many things that led to that moment that helped me deal with it in the way that I did and just having not least having the different things that have happened in my life where I was able to put this in context that even though it got a lot of attention, this was very far from being the most important thing in my life.

35:43This is an interesting thing you said. I've been on Twitter for long enough to know how to handle heated debates because you handled that moment incredibly. Like you talked earlier about the fact that we need to teach our children adaptability and resilience. That was everything up to that moment. What you've learned, how you've connected yourself, what you've learned about yourself as a human, creative designer. employer manager those creates that multifaceted armory shields whatever you want to call it like that that suit for that element of exchange which can easily throw loads of people and i'm sure that we all know that being resilient is not nice you know we don't want to ever be resilient but having resilience and know how to handle ourselves it can be our superpower because you can go through these situations and this is situations like no other for most people in our lifetime is admirable and yeah all of a sudden you became almost a household name because of what happened in a matter of minutes shall I say so this was quite remarkable but you're no longer there and you're pursuing other creative projects you've reconnected with your guitar you've got obviously your music out in the world what i really want to talk about today especially now is the fact that you've created a restaurant as one of your creative projects which is a tribute to your mom i've seen the photographs of it i've read the statement on the website and i think this should be encapsulated for the rest of the lifetime of this planet as a love letter to a parent who had a remarkable impact on their child, in this case you, and would you create it back as a creation?

37:28Because you need to tell me more about it. It's remarkable. Yeah, I was looking for a way for a long time. She died so young and she gave me so much. And I was looking for a way for a long time to somehow remember her. And then there was, when I moved back to Iceland, there was a location that was perfect. that was across the street from where I currently live. And I currently live very close to where I used to live. And I remember me and my mom passing that building. And it's a very special building and talking about it. And she really loved it. And all these things connected. And I wanted to create a place that had the feeling that I had when I was in her presence and when I experienced the things that she made.

38:16And so created this restaurant. I think it was tremendously hard. It was designed it and then built it out and building it out. In a country that doesn't have any specialists, it's very hard to build out something that's special. And so it was very hard. And I'm not sure if I would, again, going back to this idea of regret, I'm not sure if I would do it again, because turning a memory into what has to be then ultimately a business is maybe not a good idea. But I don't regret making it because, at least for a moment, it was the thing that I wanted to build in her memory. And it stood as a testament to her and to the part of her that's in me that I wanted to celebrate.

39:06Before we started recording, I told you that daring creativity isn't about jumping out of planes. It's about doing the thing that you would regret not potentially making. and in this instance it's exactly what happened you created the thing that you potentially would regret not making and now it's now it was a reality i love the fact that you say in a country with no specialists it's hard to build a restaurant how you design it so from you working digitally for most of your life what was it like to design a physical space and how did that throw you around in a way that didn't expect well we had one of the things that before i sold twitter one of the things that I was really excited about is we were already starting to work with and sort of a little bit outside of the digital world and we were working with Facebook for example on on some of their offices and I really enjoy making physical spaces we are designed and we built all our own offices that were all pretty unique and so I had some experience but this was different this was different scale and it was a design process and i worked with great people on this definitely didn't do it on my own i worked with great people on it and it turned out pretty much exactly the way or even better than i even imagined so that part was great building out the build-out process was terrible that's the part where i didn't have enough experience and i didn't have maybe the by people to work with and i didn't feel like there was appreciation for the standard that we were trying to achieve or even understanding of what it means to make something unique do you think that the restaurant needed more time to be understood or appreciated because when i see the visuals from the interior it's a transcending space it looks like it was collaborated with wes anderson in a way and i've got these beautiful hues of pink and dreamlike scapes and the silhouette of your mom being in the logo sometimes and it happens in the world let's say in the world of music you'll hear an album and you go doesn't make any sense and then five years later that was the best thing ever recorded you now was the when you had the restaurant and i believe it's closed now right well yeah i ended up deciding to close it because i really did not enjoy running the restaurant I really enjoyed designing a restaurant, did not really enjoy building it, and then ultimately did not enjoy running it.