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Connections Leadership Series Podcast

We created the Connections Podcast to help you connect to some of the most admired leaders and legends in the marketing, media and advertising industry. Many of the people who we look up to all started somewhere and this podcast aims to help connect the dots that got them to where they are.
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Jan 23, 2017

In our latest podcast, Ray Cao spoke with Phil Thomas, CEO Ascential Events, parent company of the Cannes Lions. Prior to his current role, Thomas helped run both Empire Magazine and FHM.

 

Here are our top three favorite highlights:

 

On finding your career path.

“[W]hen you look at young people leaving college, so few of them really know what they want to do, and it always takes a bit of experimentation and working around things and trying new things and jumping and changing before you really find your path. And as it happens, photography wasn't quite right for me. The thing about photography is you've got to be exceptionally talented. It's very, very, very competitive and you've got to be exceptionally talented. And I was reasonably talented, I wasn't exceptionally talented. So, I kind of worked out quite quick that photography was not gonna be quite right for me.”

 

“[When] I started writing those articles and I realized actually I seem to be better at writing than I am at photography. I mean, I think one of the things when people are trying to find their ways, you've got to be honest about what you're good at. You've got to be clear not only what you enjoy but actually what you are good at as well, and I compared my photos to my writing and I realized, you know, I'm much better at writing.”

 

On the power of in-person events.

“[The] strength of events is the face to face human need, and the interaction, face to face, and the serendipity of bumping into people, talking to strangers, getting to know people, human beings being with human beings in a physical way is very hard to replicate, it's very, very hard to digitize around that. And a lot of people have tried it. It's amazing in this day and age where you can have videoconferencing and there are all sorts of tools for people staying where they are and not being together, that despite that, airplanes pull every single day of the week with people flying to meet each other and to be in the same room as each other. So, I think the need for human beings to be together is very, very fundamental and primal need.”

 

On his best advice.

“I try and get as much sleep as I can. I know there's a big thing at the moment with this fight between macho people who think you only need four hours sleep and all this scientific evidence that seems to be pointing to the fact that you need as much sleep as possible. I happen to believe you need as much sleep as possible. I'm with Arianna Huffington on that one, so I try and get good quality sleep as much as I possibly can. And then the other great piece of advice I was given once was worry in segments, worry in sequence, because if you worry about everything all at the same time, your head will explode. You've got a load of problems to worry about, loads of things to think about, just do it one at a time and plow through it one at a time, which I find very, very useful as well.”

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