Don’t slow down, just find somewhere worth staying

I’ve never really had an off switch.

Not when I was building a card game brand from my childhood bedroom at 18. Not when I was managing communities for the UK’s largest build-to-rent provider at 20. Not when I was a digital nomad in Mexico working on USA time. Especially not when I landed in Darwin on a working holiday visa with no set plan and a carry-on.

Fast has always been my default setting and all I’ve ever known but what I’ve learned, across every role and every country is that speed without direction is just noise. The real skill is knowing how to move fast and still make everything you touch count.

And that’s what working at KWP taught me.

The pace is the point.

There’s a particular kind of person who thrives in an agency environment. Someone who can hold a brand strategy conversation at 9am, pivot to a shoot brief by lunch, and be reviewing copy before close of business. Someone who doesn’t wait to be told what the next problem is, because they’ve already spotted it.

I came into this industry wired that way. What the agency life sharpened was the discipline behind it. Moving fast means nothing if you’re not moving in the right direction for your client, and that’s what it’s all about.

The day doesn’t stop at 5pm. Neither do I.

After hours I’m painting murals across Darwin walls, teaching pilates classes, and building a travel TikTok presence that’s racked up millions of views. None of that is separate from my 9-5 work either, It just feeds it whilst also fuelling up my creativity and giving me time away from my screen.

When you spend your evenings thinking about scale, complimentary Dulux paint colours and composition on a wall, you bring a different eye to a campaign layout. When you’re teaching a class and reading the room in real time, you’re practising the same skill you use when you’re presenting creative to a client who hasn’t decided how they feel yet. When you’re scripting and filming and editing content for your own audience, you understand what it actually takes to make something perform, not just look good in a deck.

I think of my creative outlets not as a hobby sidebar, more like an engine room. Integration is the real flex.

I work across tourism, hospitality, lifestyle, and beyond. Each industry has its own language, its own pressure points, its own version of success. The account managers who stand out aren’t the ones who know one world deeply. They’re the ones who can pull ideas and integrate one industry to another before the client has even thought to ask.

A content strategy that works for travel brands has lessons for festivals and events. The crossroad is where the interesting thinking and adaptation lives, and that’s where I position myself to be.

Bring your whole toolkit, every time.

To box myself into one thing would be tricky – I would always say I’m a designer by trade but also a content creator, a strategist, a producer who understands what performs on a feed. I position myself to be the ‘best of both worlds’ and have an insight to working with talent yet also being talent myself.

I don’t leave those skills at the door when I walk into a client meeting, I bring them to the table, because a client who only gets one version of what you’re capable of is a client you could be doing more for.

The most useful thing I can be in any room is the person who sees the opportunity and angle no one else has spotted yet and bring my cards to the table. Being an asset means staying curious.

Every client, brand project or design I work with teaches me something. Diving head first into agency life I promised myself I would become a sponge and learn as much as I could with the talented people around, from my comfortable world of of 9:16’s I’ve proudly branched into advertising hitting 16:9 territory.

Working in agency the cross-industry curiosity isn’t a nice-to-have… It’s the whole job.

Darwin moves at its own pace…. Anyone who’s lived or visited here knows that. Life up here has a rhythm that’s different to anywhere else I’ve lived and has finally convinced me to settle down after 5+ years of travelling and 40+ countries.

But the work? The work keeps coming exactly at the pace I thrive in. Fast, varied, and never the same two days in a row.

I used to think slowing down was something that happened to you. I feared getting older and finding my ‘forever career’. Now I think it’s a choice, and the right environment makes it a lot make that choice of when it happens yours.

So here are some final words from a very wise 23 year old… Don’t slow down. Just find somewhere worth staying.