"What I learned this year" - Chris Ford

Eighteen months ago a friend of mine called and asked me to come help him run an agency in Sydney, Australia.

What seemed cool in conversation, quickly proved more complex in the real world. For the first time in my life I had to make a decision not about me and a job, but rather about me and a job and my wife and our two perfectly happy kids and the school they really liked and their friends and all our shit and our house that we’d rebuilt not once, but twice thanks to a dipshit roofer who did his best to burn it down.

The decision proved agonizing. To the point my wife and I took our best friends to dinner and told them we weren’t going, hugged it out, then turned around and changed our minds one last time.

So I guess what I’ve learned is, for all the thinking and planning and questioning and angst ridden hand-wringing we did, sometimes you’ve just got to say what the fuck, make a decision and make it the right decision.

Because, in the end, it will all work itself out.

Kids.

Schools.

Houses.

Taxes.

Insurance.

Whatever.

Not in the way that you hope. Not in the way that that you planed. But in a million different beautiful and unexpected ways you’ll never see coming.

Yes, the job sucked.

Yes, my friend who hired me was gone six months after I started.

And yes our two-to-three years in Australia became one.

But at the same time I met a lot of amazing talented people.

And my kids have seen the world through another country’s eyes, lived two blocks from one of the world’s most amazing zoos and walking distance to two beaches with water warm enough to actually swim in.

They’ve also got best friends on another continent, seen the great barrier reef, the Blue Mountains and the outback.

And as for all of the shit we worried so much about before making, unmaking and remaking our decision?

It just never really mattered.

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Chris is the Chief Creative Officer of Draftfcb in San Francisco.