5 rules of life from AKQA Co-Founder

What happens when a creative who’s spent twenty years designing the digital world begins to redesign his own perspective, guided by Stoic philosophy and curiosity, and finds a whole new way to create?

James is the Co-Founder of AKQA, a creative company he led for over twenty years. During this time, he has worked with clients such as Nike, BMW, Warner Bros., Audi, Heineken, XBOX, Coca-Cola, and Disney. WPP then bought a majority stake in AKQA for $550 million. 

We love learning from remarkable people about the values that shaped their journeys. So below are James Hilton’s 5 rules for life he shared with us during our Design Leaders programme. Enjoy the read, and maybe they can inspire a shift in your own creative path as well.

Master your emotions

“The single most important factor for success is the ability to master your emotions. Emotions are the single greatest opportunity that we have because they allow us to understand people, to be empathetic, or to understand problems. But they're also the largest barrier to unlocking our own potential because emotions can cloud our reasoning.”

Image: AKQA - Unleash the extra in you

Test and Grow

“We are all in startup mode all the time. We were all an experiment. We all began as an idea. We release betas of ourselves to see how the world likes it. Do I like it? Do people like it? We use a test, we grow. And if we're not doing that to ourselves consciously, how can we expect to do that to anything else successfully?”

Image: AKQA - Never Done Evolving

“Leave this world better than you found it.” 

”You came into it not knowing anything. Now's the time where we can take a step back and look inside ourselves to think, ok, well, how can I optimise? How can I redesign this life? Where is the last frontier? And the last frontier isn't that next big client. It isn't going to Cannes. The next frontier is inside your head and heart, because ultimately, we've got about two seconds left. What are we waiting for?”

Image: AKQA - Amplify with Spotify

Make excellence a habit

“Excellence is not a single act. Excellence is a habit. We have to drive that habit into ourselves and the people around us, the people who work with us and for us. And everyone needs to have that in mind in order to be as successful.”

Image: AKQA - Sounds Right

Keep experimenting 

“There is no such thing as an experiment that goes wrong. It's just giving you a result that you didn't anticipate, but you take that result and you can run the experiment again, and you run the experiment again, and you find out new things. And then if you get bored of running that experiment, try another experiment. And if you alter your perception of life, your companies, your career to that, suddenly life becomes immeasurably easier. It becomes more fun, it becomes more interesting. You are more curious. You're not expecting stuff.”

Ready to start your own transformational journey?

Learn from James Hilton and other business leaders on our Design Leaders programme.