Path to Prosek: Somewhere Between Derry and The Carlyle

These days, much of my life happens in rooms where perception carries enormous weight.

Boardrooms. Workshops. Investor conversations.

The kind of rooms where markets price belief, reputations become assets and companies are trying to decide who they are before the world decides for them.

I still love the energy of it – the sharp strategy, ambitious ideas and impossible standards. Drinks at The Carlyle after a long day when New York somehow feels both exhausting and full of possibility again.

But I did not grow up imagining this version of my life.

I grew up in Derry, in Northern Ireland, believing power belonged to other people.

Different accents. Different schools. Different families.

In Derry, a conflict zone when I was growing up, reading a room was not emotional intelligence. It was essential.

You learned early that what people said and what they meant were often two very different things.

Years later, that instinct turned out to be unexpectedly useful. Because even billion-dollar branding problems are, fundamentally, human problems.

Fear. Status. Ambition. Hope.

The same emotions. Just in much larger buildings, without the balaclavas.

Like a lot of working-class kids, I believed education would be a bridge to another life. That path eventually took me to the London School of Economics, then to teaching at USC Annenberg alongside a professor running a course called Change and Future for students with GPAs north of 3.75.

Officially, I was there to teach them. But more often than not, I was a student.

Before long, I landed at agencies like Droga5, adam&eveDDB and Ogilvy, working on brands ranging from Google and Volkswagen to Jaguar and FIFA.

At one point, I helped position Jaguar through a Super Bowl campaign inspired by Hans Gruber from Die Hard, which somehow became globally recognized and award-winning.

Before any of that, my first real job outside bartending was working for Nobel Laureate John Hume, aged only 20, documenting the story of the Derry Credit Union he founded in the 1960s, when Catholics often could not access bank accounts or fair voting rights.

I did not fully appreciate it at the time, but looking back, that work probably shaped the way I think about institutions, power and dignity more than anything that came after.

As my life expanded, I found myself collecting anecdotes.

There was a moment in Los Angeles when I pretended to take a fake phone call to avoid meeting Bill Clinton at a fundraiser because I suddenly panicked at the prospect of it. I circled back and met him properly.

There was also the time I had to drop off a film reel at George Clooney’s house while he was not home. His pot-bellied pig was.

Another time, I became convinced I was about to get fired for insisting the International Rescue Committee collaborate with artist Marc Quinn on an exhibition about refugees. His response was to place two giant cubes of frozen blood on the steps of the New York Public Library. One filled with refugee blood and the other, with non-refugee blood. The point was that under the skin, we are all the same.

Then, within the same week, Anna Wintour, Bono, Sting and Paul McCartney all agreed to support it. The project was moving ahead. Then Covid struck.

That was an education.

But somewhere between the strange moments were genuinely difficult ones too.

In 2005, I was one carriage behind the train that exploded during the 7 July London bombings.

Years later, my wife Kate and I survived the multi-fatal 2015 Philadelphia train derailment. Kate was badly injured, and in the aftermath I pulled multiple people, including her, from the wreckage before getting her safely to the emergency crew.

Experiences like that change your relationship with certainty. For a long time, I thought achievement would eventually produce safety. A lot of ambitious people quietly believe this. I certainly did.

Then something more important happened.

I met Kate.

Later came Isobel and Sofia.

The life I thought I wanted gave way to something deeper and that realization changed the way I think about work too.

These days, I love ambitious rooms more than ever. The strategy sessions. The impossible deadlines. The creatives and the makers. The people pulling magic from logic.

The moments where something shifts.

But the real shift came when I realized I no longer wanted to become somebody else in order to belong in those rooms.

Professionally, that instinct eventually led me to Prosek. I found myself drawn further upstream, closer to the moments where perception, ambition and value begin taking shape.

Somewhere between Derry and The Carlyle, I realized the world can keep getting bigger as you move through it.

More interesting. More expansive. More alive.

You just need to hold on to the original material.

That’s the compass.