Dare to never ask permission - Simon Dixon

0:09When you think about professional creativity, which is how you bring yourself, but also create something that is useful, actually relevant to people. And I think, again, we all live in the same world. We all have the same hopes and dreams, things we want. And For me, I get great satisfaction from design that I see has a meaning, has a degree of distinction, I think the word would be. I think it's hard to be truly original, but I think you can be distinct in your creativity and world view, but then it's only as good as how well it meets the world and whether or not it actually works, because anybody can be daring in a vacuum.

0:54Welcome to Daring Forever, a podcast about being human, wired for wonder, capable of courage, perpetually becoming. It's about the waves that look us under and the strange stubborn grace with which we surface. my name is Radim Manic I'm an author creative and an eternally curious human being on a mission to speak to incredible people whom I call forever daring humans those in pursuit of an extraordinary life every week I share an interview that is packed with amazing stories value and I can only ask you how will you dare forever this podcast is inspired by my upcoming book titled daring forever, which is now available for pre-order out in October.

1:42My guest today co-founding one of the most in-demand design and brand agencies 25 years ago, and today they are building systems for TikTok, Formula One, and brands billions of people use every single day. Simon Dixon is the co-founder of Dixon Baxi and a returning voice on the show. In this conversation we talk about what it really means to feel comfortable in your own skin Why doubt is the price of growth rather than something to fear And how taste, not talent, is what separates work that lasts We get into permission, access and why Simon believes there are no dead ends Only things you've won This is a masterclass in staying curious after 25 years And daring to challenge everything

2:30Simon, welcome to Daring Forever. How are you doing today? Very good, my friend. Nice to see you again. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you very much for saying that. Feelings are very much mutual. I'm really enjoying the fact that you're here as one of the first guests of my new season that coincided with the release of my new book called Daring Forever, because I've enjoyed loads of beautiful conversations about creativity, about mindful creativity, how we do our businesses and stuff. But I wrote a book that I wanted to share with the industry and society at large about the fact that how we are capable of so much more than we tell ourselves.

3:04And you are one of the living and breathing examples of what you can do when you apply yourself, when you create yourself a trajectory, your runway of what you wanted to achieve. So as you're my returning guest, we can potentially point people back to the episode we recorded a long time ago. But I will still ask you for a little introduction to tell my listeners who you are, what you do. My name is Simon Dixon. I'm one of the co-founders of Dixon Baxi. We're a creative agency, design agency, brand agency. I don't really know what we should call ourselves anymore, but we work from London all over the world.

3:38About 90 % of the work we do is international. in October it will be our 25th birthday so the 60 of us making work for TikTok and Formula One and lots of different types of companies that tens of millions hundreds of millions in many instances billions of people use every day so we build strategies identity and brand systems and the application thereof to very complex large-scale organizations globally. What does it feel like to be creative with 25 years of having a history of your own studio and obviously longer history of working as a creative what do you feel like now i don't get afraid very often to be honest it's not something i'm hardwired into i guess there's a couple of things at play there one is if you have a body of work and a body of experience you can meet the world in a way that gives you greater strength than when you first started out because obviously you've learned from your mistakes, you build the scar tissue and things like that.

4:37So I feel very comfortable. And I mean comfortable not as in settled or atrophied, but comfortable in my skin. I feel confident in my decision making. I feel confident in the team. I feel confident in the way we meet the world. And why that's important is that the world is crazy. The world is moving very quickly. It's very complex. And what I'm actually interested in is what's happening tomorrow. Many of the people I know, and we all know where the industry is and the world is in general and I think creativity is a superpower it has the ability to make things better and improve things and I want to meet the world on those terms and I think our industry needs to re-challenge what creativity means at scale for people around the world particularly in a world of intelligent technology so I'm super excited about that I feel good about knowing where I am in the world and I feel good about taking on what's next what I want to know about you feeling comfortable do you remember when did it come for you when you actually realize you can lean into yourself?

5:37Because I believe that comes with aging, that comes with time, that we can just say, this is me. This is my body. This is my vehicle. This is what carries me. This is my experience and my body of work. Do you remember that moment? I've met many people in my career, in my life. Some meet the world almost immediately with the self as self-awareness, independence, emotional intelligence, creative independence. And some take time to build a scaffolding to be able to do that. I started my first agency when I was 19. I didn't go to university, didn't go to school. So I just started and I didn't stop.

6:11I didn't ask any permission. I probably didn't either have the creativity, intelligence or knowledge to know that I shouldn't do that. But I've never been a person that has to ask permission from the world to do what I do. I believe everybody should do their version of it. And I think it takes time to get elite and to get to a very high level and skilled at it. But I just always met the world the same way. I'm exactly the same person inside in terms of my desire for creativity and the things that drive that. Obviously, I carry a body of experience and skill sets and the things that come with that.

6:45You mentioned a word which is actually the first chapter in the book, which is permission. Permission has been in some way always part of a conversation about how creativity is approached. Some people feel that potentially they need someone to show them where the dots lie and how to join them. But in your case, I think you pretty much find it yourself. Would that be right? As you enter the industry or life in general, you start to do things. You test yourself against the world, your relationships, your friendships, how you learn, what you like to make, how you carry yourself. And you start the first version of discovery about what you are.

7:22And then you continue to do that and your relationships shape that. I think relationships are incredibly important, but they should be shaped around a mutual benefit of doing something together rather than a generic notion of a particular idea. I think our industry is amazing at coming up with buzz phrases and ideas, but under that, it's not that complicated. The biggest thing I think, if you're talking about this particular subject, is access. It's very easy to be daring if you can pay the rent. It's very easy to be daring if you have created the infrastructure for that to happen. Because it's a broad notion, and the idea that we excavate bravery or daring is the opposite.

8:03It's actually creating the infrastructure and a safe space and mindset for people to feel they can be creatively expressive, and then figure out how that meets the world. So when I was young and Mason, I didn't realize I needed scaffolding and furniture. I just thought I'll make things to see what people felt. But I've always wanted to make things that move people emotionally and that get a response from people. I like that feeling of making something and seeing people use it. And it improves things or excites them and there's an emotional context to it. And I think being a designer, when I started out, I liked the idea of making things that I think push the envelope of where I am and to a certain extent the industry.

8:43A while ago you said that you had a desire for creativity and what it made me think about with your recent thing that you just said, you said there's a mutual respect and partnership, you give yourself permission to be. But when you're a solo architect thinking about creativity plus the creativity versus the world, some people don't necessarily have the access to mentors or support or even agency jobs that they have to work out stuff on their own. That's what I did. I didn't have a job. I've never had a mentor. Any infrastructure I have, I built. I think there's a confusion between solo and group.

9:20It's a bit like specialist and generalist. They're made up ideas. Even if you're an individual, you don't operate individually. You have to have some sort of infrastructure, relationships in life, the work you do, whether that's self-initiated or it's for other people. As you and I are talking about applied professional creativity, that has a number of stakeholders in that. If we're just talking about pure creativity and pure self-expression where you have zero responsibility, then what we're talking about is art and being an artist, and then that self-expression is about how you meet the world.

9:53But we're talking about applied creativity, which has stakes and stakeholders. Whenever I've developed my career, I've considered those people. The first stakeholders are me. How does the work make me feel? Does it elevate me? Am I growing? The second thing is my partners are people I would work with. That could be a sound designer. It could be one of my creative partners. It could be typographer. And then there's the client, the person who facilitates or sponsors whatever I'm making. But actually, I'm designing for people around the world. Whether that's the rave flyer for 50 people in a nightclub when I started out or a billion people a day with TikTok.

10:30It's the same feeling, which is I share something and I hope I love it. But really what I want is the end audience not to love it because they'll never know I designed it. But I like the idea that it will be useful, meaningful and move the needle for them in some way. If I was an individual solopreneur, I would still think the same way. We're all interconnected and there is a contextual nature if you're professionally creative. You said that when you design with zero responsibility, that's art. And you talk about work for a billion people, which you said you like to do work that moves people. I know you balance it well, but how do you balance responsibility for creativity for something that has the desired outcome that you actually want to move people and you can't manipulate them, but you create stuff that appetizes them to actually say, look, this is meaning something to them.

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12:09Great question when you think about professional creativity, which is how do you bring yourself, but also create something that is useful or actually relevant to people? And I think, again, we all live in the same world. We all have the same hopes and dreams, things we want. And for me, I get great satisfaction from design that I see has a meaning, has a degree of distinction, I think the word would be. I think it's hard to be truly original, but I think you can be distinct in your creativity and worldview. But then it's only as good as how well it meets the world and whether or not it actually works.

12:44Because anybody can be daring in a vacuum. Anybody can be brave in a vacuum. But it's actually when you're tested in public on something that has a responsibility, do you actually see if it works? And those skills are very hard work. That takes a long time to get a lead at that when you're carrying the responsibility of something large. But I think the principle is the same, though. But actually, when you were talking, it just reminded me a quote by Alain de Botton, who said, the book is only good if it finds the person at the right time. when you think about creativity commercial creativity sometimes the work clicks when it finds the audience at the right time would you agree yeah the difference between him and us is that he's writing a book for an audience which he instinctually will know because he's part of that audience but he will trust that they exist we're creating design and infrastructure and communication system to communicate something else we're in service of the thing we're creating So there is a different master and a different level to it.

13:46I have to operate in a world which has lots of different kind of interconnected and contextual moving parts. If we as an agency build a design system for Formula One, I have to think about somebody in Asia and somebody in Europe and someone in North America and how they'll interact with that brand. But then I have to think about, is it on their phone or is it a racetrack? What level of ticket did they buy? How does the brand sit alongside Tanker and the King of Spain? What if I'm watching that drive to survive versus watching the highlights versus watching something else? So that's a different way of looking at how design and creativity works because it's in service of something.

14:23If I write a book, which I have done, it's in service of the idea of the book. And I hope that would connect with a specific audience and actually maybe reach some people who wouldn't necessarily think about my topic in general. It's interesting that you zoomed in on the author and the particular topic with a specific audience because I think that quote applies to general. Any book is a good book. If you find you in the right time, sometimes it takes for a brand retooling or for rebranding, it takes time to mature for it to propagate in a way or just spread into the right places because I feel when we see lots of new case studies as they happen, they're quite light on depth because newness to it.

15:03Yeah. Who's your favourite author? Actually, Oliver Bergman. Oliver Bergman's my favourite author. Okay, great. So let's say I say Kurt Vonnegut is my favourite author, just for argument's sake. You might have no relationship with Vonnegut whatsoever, and I might have no relationship... Did you say Bergman? Oliver Bergman, yeah. Yeah, obviously I've read some of his work, but I might not have any relationship with that particular author. But both are meaningful. Both have value. and branding works the same way, which is you're creating something that has great meaning for a certain audience and then that meaning gets looser as awareness kind of fades and then there will be certain people who actively are not interested in what you've done.

15:46So if we created a brand for AC Milan, soccer club or football club, Inter Milan fans will have an active dislike in that. So it's okay to have different types of relationships and authors, I think, they stand and fall by their reputation. So obviously what happens is over time, people will decide how well they write, whether their ideas are adding to the canon, are they bringing an insight or an approach that is capturing something fresh and different. And over time, your reputation is a differentiator because you win things, awards come and go, things happen. But over time, your body of work and the way you meet the world tells people what you are.

16:27And that's unequivocal and undeniable because it's everything. So authors get that. Painters get that. Brand or designers get that. You are perceived by the effect of your work and how it shows up in the world. I can only agree. With work at large, one of the chapters in the book is about curiosity because I believe that we start with permission when it actually aligns with the journey that you had, when I had, that I didn't search anyone's permission. I just started because I had a pure desire for creativity, for design, and that what led me. Because I felt there was fewer resources, fewer mentors at that time, at least in my journey.

17:03And it was a beautiful melee of wrong decisions and mistakes to work out. What can you actually do and how to work it out when you realize that you've got no clients, no portfolio, no philosophy, but you're still trying to make it work. That's a beautiful definition of madness in a way. But you still make it work because you're going after that desired effect, which is I want to have a studio one day and I want to do this for a living. So it starts with permission because I don't really say it. It's a question between now versus how. Opportunity or commission comes to you and you said, this is the moment of now.

17:34I've got no idea how to do this right now, but I'm going to say yes to it and work it out. I'm sure you will totally attest to some of the decades where everyone's taken a lot of commissions and had no idea how to do any of it. But we went out and made stuff. I mean, we didn't always were fully formally, fully ready for this. At that moment, when you give yourself that permission or you accept that this is a permission to go somewhere, you come to the point of acceptance, realizing that I'm the person here right now who can create that work. As you said, you bring yourself to this equation to say, when you allow yourself to enjoy the moment and say, well, I'm Simon Dixon and this is what only Simon Dixon can do, kind of sets you, in my opinion, on this journey of curiosity when you realize that you don't have to second guess yourself what you can do, how you can do it and actually enjoy the path.

18:21So on the topic of curiosity, how do you see the word? How do you see the topic? The thing I would say is what are you curious about? Because curiosity doesn't mean anything. It's like saying I like something. I'm interested in what people are curious about. And I think there's another thing which goes in parallel with that, which is being attentive and is being aware of things. Because a lot of great insight and great inspiration comes from looking at things and absorbing them and figuring them out and reprocessing them back into your creativity. So I think what happens is curiosity is conflated with a lot of different things in the creative process.

19:00So whenever I think about any broad term, my thing is, so what is the thing? So if you're curious, what are you curious about? Or why does it matter to me? Why does it matter to you? Or why does it matter to the world? That's the thing I'm constantly thinking because words don't come into my head. When I'm working and somebody offers us a project, One thing I've never thought I couldn't do, what I've always thought is that this might stretch us, but that's like being in the gym. So you get used to curling 5K. You get used to being in the gym, you're in your show-ups, you know how it feels, you've hydrated, you've had your power bar, and then you try to curl 7.5 kilos.

19:37But it's an extension of something you've already done. Up to a year later, I'm curling 15 kilos. It's part of a journey. You don't start every moment empty. Your hand is full of things. your experience, your relationships, your confidence or lack of confidence, the tools and technique you've learned. And you say, right, with these things, I'm going to go make something now. And that gives you great strength. So that's how I see things. I don't ever see anything as empty. I see things as contextual, which is, today, what am I curious about? And what I'm curious about today is you, because you're saying things to me that are challenging me to think about creativity.

20:13So it's an interesting conversation. So I'm really curious why you picked the word daring. I'm also really curious why you pick the word forever. They're really interesting things. I'm not to pick on that noun, just as a thing. So when you send me information, I'm curious about what our relationship is and what we might do together or what the benefit of that is. So that's how I think about it. I can actually fill in the backstory for you because Daring Forever seems to me this gentle manifesto of reminding people that we can live in a world with no regrets of pursuing things that we want to do.

20:45because the story is, and actually it was after I saw you at OFF, not this year, but year before, I had four titles for this book. This book is inspired by my TEDx talk from late 2024, which was about live lessons from creativity. I believe that lessons in resilience, self-acceptance, curiosity come from creativity. I think creativity is a great teacher, which kind of gives us the vehicle and the drive and the explorations of what we can find in our lives. And I had four different titles. One of them was Creative Life Lessons. And I was just about to interview James Victore for the previous podcast, which was called Daring Creativity.

21:24And before I had that title, I was thinking, James Victore would never name a book Creative Life Lessons. He would call it something, F this, F that, do this, do whatever, be a rebel. And I thought Daring Creativity was one of the titles I wanted to do. Daring in a way, I speak English as a second language, So for me, daring obviously is I've got my own personal meaning to the word. Then there's a societal meaning and there's a dictionary meaning, just like everything else. Everyone's got their own meaning of creativity. There's a societal idea of what creativity might be. There's a dictionary and that definition for every person is different because we all got our own relationship to it because we feel it differently.

22:03so what I wanted to do is just to say look when I ask people what daring forever means to them I'm almost always astounded and amazed by the positive reaction when they say this is who I am this is what I stand for I don't stand over the edges people stand tall when you ask them something which is almost a rallying cry what does daring forever mean because they might not always think about the fact that they are daring and they're doing all the time so this is what I wanted to challenge the topic because some of the people that I know that answer that question I know about their struggles I know about their insecurities I know that they haven't always gone for the thing they should have gone for and when I think about your career I can totally say no this has been a daring forever career because you are where you want it to be in my opinion you are standing tall you share a lot you've got this generosity because you don't have to second guess yourself about who Simon Dixon.

23:02So that's my backstory on Daring Forever. You've talked a lot there about being aware of how things work. And I think that's really helpful. It's really powerful because what you're doing is listening to yourself, but you're flexible enough to adapt to things contextually. And what that means is you're constantly learning. You're not calcified in an idea. And I'm very nervous about calcifying around a specific idea because things change. You learn things, the world changes. But what I do like are principles. I like ways of acting. And the biggest one of all, there's two of them really. One is self-determination and the other is control.

23:42Neither of which are in a kind of ego, maniacal way. If you can control your environment, you can improve your ability to serve people well or do things that are amazing. Again, based on your terms relative to what you do. and a lot of people find it very difficult to be self-determined because the world limits people's access, tells them things that are just not true, overloads them. When I think about daring, I think actually most of the work is done in an unglamorous, quiet way. It's like this idea that everyone's on the edge of a cliff is just bollocks. That's not how bravery and creativity works in our world.

24:19There are people like that. If you want nurses and doctors and people who actually work in a way that is fundamentally difficult, or maybe an astronaut. But for us, it's about creating the environment for people to feel they can create the best version of themselves and feel what you just described in that conversation, which is if you want to say fuck you, you can do it. If you don't want to say that, it's also cool. And within the remit of creativity, it's a very broad thing. and I think often what happens is we try and collapse it down to a handful of things it doesn't work like that I mean even creativity is a word you talked a moment ago about learning from creativity I don't think it works that way what you're actually doing is using creativity as a vehicle to either gather insight or translate that insight into something then that's kind of its job and you can learn from that process but again for me it's the actual process of doing it that is the key because a lot of these conversations are stood on the sideline.

25:21So if you talk about being daring, that's about what you're willing to give up, what you're willing to lose, not just what you're willing to gain. You have to turn down free pitching. You have to say we're doing remote working or we're not doing remote working. You have to say we won't work in gambling. You have to actually make choices which in the dark when no one's watching and they don't see that, that's actually what determines you. Not necessarily a glamorous ideal of being the coolest designer because you and I could have cool ideas instantly. I would hope. I've not worked with you personally, but I'm guessing you have a lot of cool ideas based on what I've met from you.

26:00But they die very quickly if you haven't created the environment and the context for them to live and to actually meet the world. So that's my job. That's what I do. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely something about the systems that you can have an idea that just doesn't go. If you don't let go of something and you believe in it, you can take a long time to make it. But I think it's determination that, in this case, I would say actually that curiosity of what something can become. Because I'm enjoying how much you are flexing the word daring because to me, from this, I've spent a lot longer thinking about that by a general concept than you.

26:37To me, that feels like a cherry on top because it's almost a reminder that things are possible. Because the book itself overall is about the neuroscience of the brain. The neuroscience of the brain, because I wanted to almost create a body of work where we can share it with our industry and maybe be outside the edges, where when you think about the labels of imposter syndrome, shyness, introverts, that kind of stuff, there's a lot that happens in our bodies and in our nervous system and in our brains that dictate how we operate what I call the vehicle, which is the body. And there's lots of emotions that hardwired systems and emotions that we feel from very much in ancestral times.

27:18We've been hardwired to look out for fear. We've been hardwired to look out for danger and that kind of stuff. And our world has moved on, but our ancient system hasn't moved on that much. So we've been built for pursuit, but yet I feel like we find ourselves in a generational era where we are pursuing pleasure. The interesting thing about this is, again, it's the semantics of the word. You say fear, I say doubt. If you're going to grow and develop as a person, you will feel doubt. It goes back to being in the gym again. When you exercise, you'll feel an ache in your arm. Because you're growing and developing, and creativity is the same.