It's always good to have a triggering event. I was with my dad when he died and I looked after him for five months prior to his death. My dad was going to be a great writer. He'd written a book when he was young and sold it, but he never finished it.

I grew up with parents who were outsiders and for various reasons, they were on the outskirts. They earned their way back in but we grew up in a tight-knit family on the edge, outside. So that's the first thing - I grew up without being afraid of the outside.

For me, in a nutshell, how the role of creativity is shifting is mirrored in my own story. We're going back to the roots. So, often products or services relied on the output of creatives to make their business more interesting or stand out, whatever that might be. What I find now is that there's all this common brand purpose. I think we've got to go back to the building blocks of creativity, we've got to get back to the basics.

As much as creativity is about having an imagination and thinking about things, there's an element of rigour that other people don't see. I have to get up really early and I have to go to bed really late because I am my work. I'm building things now that will be bigger than me, but ultimately there's this combination of rigour and creativity. And the rigour is hugely important.

I went through quite a fairly well-publicised alcoholic addiction, and then I graduated to cocaine - they go delightfully together because you can drink so much more when you're high. But it was catastrophic and I ended up at Milpark Cardiac High Care a few times at the end of an evening. You know you've had a really good night when you end up, not at a bar, but at a hospital and your bill for drinks arrives on a Discovery letterhead. As a result, I rearranged my body's chemistry quite badly and I threw it into disarray, so I had crippling anxiety attacks for about a year and a half - every day. I couldn't fly. I couldn't be in a room by myself. I had to pay people to watch me fall asleep. It was ridiculous.

The first thing we talk about is how you feel when you leave the group to go and stand at the front. It's just a few feet, but there's an incredible journey that you take because your body starts to go through some stuff. What's really happening on a deep genetic level is that you are in the herd and you leave the herd.

In mime training, they call it the snap. It's like you're not acting and then (snap!) you're on - like everything becomes crisp and precise. If you don't do that before you present, you're wasting a huge opportunity. From this moment to that moment, there has to be a show. It's escapism. Whether you're presenting figures or whether you are presenting some kind of crazy idea.

Something Robert Hodgins said to me when we were doing some painting work - he called me either Johnny comedian or dear boy - he said, "If you can stay as awake with a paintbrush as you are on stage with a microphone, you're a great painter". What he meant was, we have these aerials and I think a good performer or a leader's aerials are on. When I talk about listening, I'm not just talking about listening, I'm talking about your body as this incredible collection of senses. 

I think events are always exciting because human beings love to be connected, and there's nothing quite like a big group of people with a common thrill, which is what an event should be. There is something wonderful about the in-the-flesh experience. 

If you're going to work hard because if you're going to do anything really good, you're going to have to work hard, don't waste time with shit teachers. Find the people that really make you thump and get close to them, whatever it takes. I have some people I speak to. One is a billionaire investor who I don't see very often, but we have a good connection, not really around business, but around art and food.