How I Got Here

For close to a decade, I made things that looked extraordinary and meant almost nothing.

I should be more generous to my past self, perhaps. The teams I assembled were brilliant. The craft was genuinely ambitious. We built things that won awards at D&AD and Spikes Asia and Cannes. But the nature of advertising is that nothing is built to last. A campaign exists long enough to be photographed for a case film, submitted for an award, and retired. Some of the work was honestly just about making beautiful things, and at least that was transparent in its purpose. The more insidious category was the work that showed up wearing an impact costume: projects that sounded, in an elevator pitch, like they were changing the world. Free coaching for kids. Health apps. Technology that brought communities together. The elevator pitch was always magnificent. The reality was that none of it was designed to stay.

I was good at this. Not because I was a better producer or a sharper strategist than anyone else, but because I understood, in some inarticulate way, that language had a power most people underestimated. That the right sentence, delivered at the right speed, with the right silence before and after it, could bypass everything rational in a person and go straight to the gut. I understood that this power was enormous, and morally neutral, and available to anyone who learned to wield it. And I had handed it, for a decade, to whoever signed the purchase order.

But I am telling this story out of order. To understand what I meant by "meant almost nothing", I need to go back to an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, more wine than was wise, and a living room covered in flip-chart paper like a Tony Robbins seminar for one.

I had chosen Logistics as my master’s specialisation. Not because I found it fascinating, but because I was afraid, and it seemed intellectually challenging enough, and the more-or-less guarantee of employment. A year into my first job, at a French cement manufacturer in Malaysia, I was comprehensively unfulfilled. My manager called me into his office. "So, Thomas," he said. "Would you like to stay?" I stood there and realised I did not know the answer, because I did not know what I wanted. The only thing I knew was that not knowing was no longer acceptable. It is okay not to want this. It is not okay not to look for what you do want.

I went home, bought more wine than I should have, and covered the walls of my living room in paper. I wrote questions to myself. What am I good at? What am I terrible at? Where does my mind go when nothing is demanding its attention? And the hardest one: what is my passion?

Most people do not have a passion that fits neatly into a job title. If you are passionate about magic, go be a magician. But most of us have something messier: an interest that spills across several boxes; that does not correspond to any listing on a recruitment website. That does not mean the passion is not real. It means the translation is harder.

I got so drunk I passed out on the couch. But when I woke up, the answers were all there on the wall, in my own drunken scrawl, circled several times: the power of words.

It is a deceptively simple idea. That we can attach a string of characters together, form them into words, arrange the words into sentences, deliver those sentences at the right speed with the right pauses in between, and convince anyone of anything. That language, wielded with precision, captures the imagination and bypasses rational thought. That a well-told story can make a room full of strangers cry, or vote, or buy, or change their minds about something they have believed their entire lives.

This is beautiful. It is also dangerous. The same instrument that can heal can also deceive. You can apply this power to selling cement, or writing novels, or fixing someone’s trauma, or starting a war. The power itself does not care what you point it at.

I did not think about it in those terms at the time. I was twenty-three and hungover and excited. Advertising seemed like the most playful and interesting place to start: an industry that took the craft of persuasion seriously, that celebrated clever language, that rewarded people who could make an audience feel something in thirty seconds. So I found my way, through a chain of events involving a stint in Vietnam and a credible threat to several kittens (a longer story for another time), to my first job at a small agency in Singapore, at the very bottom of the ladder, working for a man who bullied me.

He ran his shop like a furnace. The hours were brutal. The pay was barely enough to survive on. The treatment was, by any reasonable standard, unacceptable. He told me, regularly, that I would be grateful for all of it later. I hated him for saying this. But he was right, and I hate that he was right. The work ethic I carry into everything I do was forged in that pressure, and I cannot honestly pretend otherwise.

From there, the career accelerated. Bigger agencies. Bigger clients. Bigger teams. I moved from producing campaigns to building entire production operations. I was promoted. I won awards. I built teams that built things that won more awards. And through all of it, the power of words was there, the thread I was holding, though I had gradually stopped asking what it was for.

The company sent me back to Malaysia. Back to the country I had left years earlier, unfulfilled and out of a job, now returning with a title and a chequebook. Build a creative production hub in Kuala Lumpur, they said. From scratch, as fast as you can. Here is an open field and a virtually unlimited budget. The reasoning behind the move was less inspiring than the mission itself: Singapore was too expensive, and someone upstairs had apparently concluded that Malaysia was "kind of like cheap Singapore." That was about the extent of the strategic analysis. But I did not care. I was a builder. I had the field. I got on a plane.

My inspiration was twofold: the company I had joined years earlier, back when it was still small enough to genuinely believe in craft and creative freedom, and Pixar, as described by Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc. Allow for identity. Allow for mistakes. Make the building a place where people want to do their best work because the environment asks it of them, not because the hierarchy demands it. For a while, it felt like a start-up. There was chaos, inevitably, but the kind of chaos that comes from building something real. We hired well. We trained carefully. I implemented a mentorship programme across every discipline.

I spoke openly about my own anxiety, because if someone in my position could say "I’m not always fine," maybe the people around me could say it too. The Malaysian advertising industry had long been treated as a de facto production sweatshop: cheap output, long hours, a workforce conditioned to expect burnout as part of the bargain. The first question every candidate asked in interviews was about work-life balance, and I quickly stopped being frustrated by the question and started understanding what it revealed. These were talented people who had been ground down by an industry that treated them as disposable. I introduced insurance that covered therapy. It felt like the least we could do.

I could not figure out what my metric of success was supposed to be. Number of people? Revenue? Duration? I knew I had not come to Malaysia to be a permanent manager. I had come to be the first builder. Eventually, I settled on something: I had to make myself redundant. If I could take a three-week holiday and come back to find the building still standing, the work still moving, the people still cared for, then I had done my job. We had grown to eighty people by then. Producers, designers, animators, leading web and content production across the APAC region.

I took the holiday. I came back. The building was still there.

And just like that, I no longer had purpose.

What I did not understand, while I was busy building, was that I was also watching myself become irrelevant to the thing I had built. The hub was working. The teams were delivering. And the very fact of its success meant it no longer needed the person who had willed it into existence.

But the loss of purpose was only part of it. Something subtler was happening underneath: a slow misalignment between the values I thought I was serving and the values the organisation actually held. Rapid growth changes a company the way water changes a riverbed: gradually, then all at once. I noticed that the conversations had shifted. Less about the work. More about the politics. I found myself caring deeply about things the structure around me treated as afterthoughts: the mental health of our people, the burnout culture in the Malaysian advertising industry, the question of whether the work we were doing was genuinely good or just good enough to bill for.

I wrote an op-ed about what I saw as broken in the industry. It was spiked. I advocated for people during a crisis and was told to focus on output instead. I watched decisions get made that ran counter to everything I believed the place stood for. I do not say any of this with bitterness. I have made my peace with the fact that organisations change, and that the version of a company you fall in love with is not always the version you leave. That is just the nature of the thing.

But it taught me something I have carried into everything I have done since. I think about work through what I call the utility factor: how much do people genuinely need this? The advertising work had always scored low on utility, but it had compensated with craft. Extraordinary, obsessive, painstaking craft. When the craft started to erode as well, I was left with a job that scored low on both counts. I had no reason to stay. Not out of resentment, but out of clarity.

The burnout, when it arrived, was not the kind that comes from working too hard. It was the kind that comes from working hard at something that no longer means anything. A different animal entirely. Harder to name, harder to explain to people who assume burnout is about hours. I have enormous respect for the people I worked alongside and the things we built together. But a chapter is a chapter, and this one had ended.

I did my best. I left.

There is a French expression, la fuite en avant, that has no clean English translation. It describes the act of fleeing forward: the appearance of purposeful movement that is, in truth, an escape. You look like you are going somewhere. You are not. You are running from something, and using velocity as camouflage.

I planned a big year. The bucket list year. A full calendar of adventures designed to answer the question that the advertising career had failed to: what should I actually be doing with my life? I visited thirty-seven countries. I did a lifetime’s worth of adventures in twelve months. And somewhere around the midpoint, a strange unease settled in.

I could not understand why I was not in a constant state of exhilaration. Could this lifestyle simply be my new default? Other people clock in at work; I just fly to Turkmenistan. But the deeper problem was subtler and uglier: it had started to feel like consumption for its own sake. Give me this experience. I want that experience. Every adventure was entirely self-directed. Every thrill served an audience of one.

By the time I reached Machu Picchu, surrounded by the kind of beauty that is supposed to make you feel alive, I felt the opposite. I was still running from something, and I had run so far that I had lapped myself.

The next thing on the calendar was different, though I did not fully understand how different until I was in it.

I had signed up, two years earlier with my friend Nic, for a race across India in a tuk-tuk. An auto-rickshaw. The kind of absurd, sweaty, mechanical-failure-guaranteed event that exists purely for the story you tell afterwards. But in the months leading up to it, as the unease of the bucket list year grew heavier, I started asking: what if we used this ridiculous platform for something that is not entirely about us?

I had burned out. Mental health was personal to me, and I was already an advocate. India had a devastating trifecta: a critical shortage of available mental health care professionals, an inability for most people to pay for what little existed, and a social stigma so deep that seeking help was itself considered shameful.

We partnered with Sangath, an Indian NGO working on mental health access. We painted our tuk-tuk to look like a New York taxi, strapped a portable counselling station to the back, and wrote on the side: A free ride and a free consultation.

It was messy. It was brilliant. Sangath tracked our location and sent us flyers in whatever language was spoken in the region we were passing through, because India is a country of staggering linguistic complexity and our Hindi was, charitably, decorative. When we found people who clearly wanted to talk but had no language in common with us and no interest in a counselling session, we did the only reasonable thing: we pumped karaoke through the speakers and sang together. Connection is connection. Sometimes it arrives through a clinical intake form, and sometimes it arrives through a badly performed Bollywood number in a three-wheeled vehicle on a potholed road in Tamil Nadu.

We finished the race last. We made the national newspapers twice. We got matching dragon tattoos on our backsides, each with a tuk-tuk on the tongue of the dragon, which I concede is not the most conventional way to commemorate a mental health campaign. To hell with convention.

But the Happy Cab, as we called it, taught me something I had not been able to learn in thirty-seven countries: the missing piece was not a destination, or a thrill, or an experience. It was an audience that was not myself. For the first time all year, the power of words, the instinct to connect, to persuade, to move people, had been aimed at someone who needed it. And it had worked.

I am many things, and one of them is a sailor. I hold an RYA Day Skipper certificate, and the sea has always felt like the closest thing I have to a church. The bucket list year was supposed to end with a race across the Atlantic. I had been selected for it. Over Christmas dinner, the year before the gap year began, I was bragging about this to my family when I noticed my step-father’s face. He looked visibly saddened. Crossing the Atlantic had been his dream for decades. He had once bought a boat to do it, and then life happened, as it does, and the boat was sold and the crossing never happened. He was now over seventy. The door was closing.

"Why don’t you sign up with me?" I said. He shook his head. "I can’t do a race, Thomas. I’m too old. At a leisurely pace, perhaps." I was a little drunk by this point, and full of good intentions. "Forget the race," I said. "We will find a boat and cross it together. You and me. We will follow the trade winds."

A catamaran would be gentler on an ageing body than a monohull. In the French Caribbean, tourism companies order catamarans by the dozen, but they are built in La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of metropolitan France, and someone has to sail them across. We would be a luxury courier service. The trade winds blow westward from November through the end of the year: let them fill your sails from behind and you are there in no time. Our window was set.

Almost immediately after the tuk-tuk, I flew to France, caught a brand-new catamaran that had never touched open water, and pointed it at the Caribbean with my step-father beside me.

The beginning of an Atlantic crossing from France is the roughest part, which is deeply unfair but strangely appropriate. The Bay of Biscay threw everything at us. We were rusty sailors on a boat whose mast had never experienced wind, whose electronics had never been tested in anger. Rain that never stopped. Cold that settled into the bones. Reports of orcas attacking rudder blades near the Strait of Gibraltar. Nights spent on watch, scanning for shipping containers, the boat rolling endlessly.

But once we cleared Cabo Verde, the real crossing began, and the world changed entirely.

No life for thousands of kilometres. Just the sea, and the sky, and the wind at our back, and endless days dissolving into the most lavish starry nights I have ever witnessed. My step-father and I are very different people from very different generations. He is a taciturn man. We shared meals. I fished, he cooked. But the conversations were spare, and that was fine. The real companionship was structural: three-hour night watches, relayed back and forth, one of us awake and alert while the other slept.

It is at night, on the watch, that the thinking happens. You are alone with the horizon and the stars and whatever is inside your head, and there is nothing to distract you. No phone signal. No news. No next destination to research. Just the accumulated weight of an extraordinary year, and finally, the time and the silence to make sense of it.

I wrote poems to my lover and sealed them in wine bottles. I started drawing again, something I had not done in years. I read the poetry I had packed, learning its rhythms by heart. And I turned the year over and over, like a stone in the palm of my hand, examining each face of it.

The shape of it was so clear from out there. The power of words, discovered in a wine-soaked apartment in Kuala Lumpur. A decade of wielding it in the service of nothing meaningful. The burnout: not from exhaustion, but from the growing certainty that the power did not matter if the purpose was absent. The bucket list year: thrilling, but ultimately another form of consumption. And then the tuk-tuk, the sudden pivot outward, the first time in a year that the question had changed from "what do I want?" to "what do others need?"

I cannot point to a single morning on the Atlantic when the conviction arrived fully formed. I think it assembled itself gradually, like a coastline appearing out of fog. But I know that when we finally moored at Port du Marin, in Martinique, on Christmas Eve, forty-three days after leaving France, and after my step-father and I had celebrated the completion of his lifelong dream in the manner it deserved, I knew what came next.

The power of storytelling is entirely meaningless if not applied as a force for good.

You can have the adventurous life. You can have the craft and the ambition and the creative freedom. But it needs a deeper purpose, and that purpose needs to serve someone other than yourself. That was the thread. I had been following it all year without knowing what to call it.

I had hired Vann Law years earlier, during my Singapore days. We were working on an initiative between Apple and the Singapore government: an app called LumiHealth, designed to improve people’s health through behavioural nudges and gamification. Our first collaboration, in hindsight, was already about using storytelling to serve someone’s wellbeing. A coincidence I did not notice at the time.

What I noticed immediately was her craft. Vann is a character animator, and her work had a quality of attention that stopped you. During our first in-person meeting, she told me that she liked to sit on park benches and watch how people’s hip joints moved, so she could recreate the motion at home. That sentence told me more about her as an animator than any showreel ever could. She sees movement the way poets see language: as raw material that most people walk past without noticing.

But Vann is more than an extraordinary animator. She revealed herself, over time, as a thinker and a leader. She has an operational mind and a passion for process, which sounds unglamorous until you understand that animation is a discipline where creativity collapses without organisation. She is deeply introspective, far more introverted than I am, and she thinks for a long time before she speaks. She never interrupts. People who are uncomfortable with silence tend to fill the space with sound, and Vann gets an extraordinary amount out of those people by simply waiting. I should know. I am one of them.

She was instrumental in building the animation arm of the Malaysia hub. Her interview questions were always sharper than mine. After my year around the world, I reconnected with her. She had also left, tired of the same grind, the same politics, the same feeling of working hard at something hollow. She wanted to tell stories from Southeast Asia, told by Southeast Asians, in her medium of choice: 2D animation. She wanted to build a collective of artists from across the region. Done well, it would lead, eventually, to a feature-length animated film she could direct. She had started something called ROUGE Collective as a side project, a passion experiment. But it was not lifting off the ground.

I offered to join her. Turn the passion project into a real proposition. See if we could make it fly.

We are very different people with different motivations. She is an animation artist who wants to create original work. I am the one who believes that animation, specifically, is where the power of words finds its fullest expression. Because animation can do something no other medium can: it makes the invisible visible. You cannot film the turmoil inside a depressed mind, but you can animate it. You cannot photograph a thousand years of Balinese history unfolding across a museum wall, but you can draw it. You cannot put a camera on the friendship between a palm oil worker and a teenage Bornean elephant in a way that makes a room full of policymakers feel it in their chests, but you can tell that story in two dimensions and a handful of colours and watch it land.

Animation makes complex, sensitive, and abstract stories feel urgent and human. It crosses linguistic barriers more easily than live action. It can go places cameras cannot, and it can stay there long enough for the audience to feel something real. When people truly feel, they become catalysts for change. Entertainment and impact are not mutually exclusive.

We meet at the crossroads: animated stories that move hearts in Southeast Asia. In January 2024, two weeks after I stepped off the boat, we incorporated a company, built pitch decks, and began.

This is the part where a more polished version of me would tell you about the five-year plan, the scaling strategy, the revenue milestones. I do not have those, or rather, I have versions of them that change every quarter as we learn more about what ROUGE is and what it is not.

What I know is this: we are Asia’s first B Corp certified animation studio, guided by the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. We make work for organisations that are trying to do something good in the world and need help making their message land. ROUGE Collective is a remote-first animation studio spanning Southeast Asia. The best animators regardless of where they wake up. Nobody commutes. Nobody relocates. We are big on purpose and we are small, on purpose. And we are figuring it out as we go, which I have come to believe is the only honest way to build something that actually means what it says.

The power of words is real. I have seen it sell things nobody needs, and I have seen it move a room to tears over a story about a teenage elephant. The difference is not in the instrument. It is in what you choose to point it at.

I am confident about the mission. I am humble about the craft. I am learning, constantly, how much I do not know about running a studio, about directing animation, about writing scripts that do justice to the stories people trust us with. I have dropped anchor permanently outside of my comfort zone, and most days, I am glad to be here.

If you have read this far, you are either considering working with ROUGE, or you are a deeply patient human being, or both. Either way: thank you. And if you have got a story worth telling, I would love to hear about it.