Ten Years Ago …

Ten years ago I climbed a hill behind our house, out of earshot of anyone but a few sheep, and I wept. Things were about as tough as they’d ever been for me as an adult. I’d tried unsuccessfully to leave the agency I’d founded, now the agency was about to fold and I knew that we’d lose our house. My wife was struggling desperately with post-natal depression. And my Dad had just been diagnosed with a brain tumour.

It was bad.

And as I sat weeping on the hillside I was without hope.

What I didn’t know then was that in that awful moment my life was being reset. Everything was about to go back to zero. After fifteen years of working late nights, weekends and everything in between, I was now going to lose our family home and our savings. My self-perception was in tatters: I was a failure. The one thing I still had — and boy did I cling to it — was my love for my family.

But from that blank slate, slowly, month by month, year by year, a new path began to emerge. I knew that whatever I was going to do to make a living I wanted it to have more meaning than just getting people to watch stuff or buy things. And somehow, almost by accident, I found myself working with a new purpose. I’d always believed in creativity as a good thing. So I decided I was going to do what I could, in my own small way, to bring more creativity into the world.