Paul Parolin grew up in Guelph. Guelph is a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada, known for its strong manufacturing and agricultural history. His father was an art teacher. An astute observers of his father’s musings, Paul became intrigued by illustration and graphic design from a young age. Needless to say, Guelph was not the place for a young person like Paul to thrive, so he moved to nearby Toronto to attend the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), Canada’s oldest and largest educational institution for art and design. He felt at home immediately. As Parolin says, “For the first time, I was now surrounded by like-minded people.”
Parolin entered the world of advertising upon finishing his studies at OCAD, yet as the years passed by, he noticed that the work from Canada’s top advertising houses was becoming stale. The most prominent creatives – those whose work he had greatly admired for years – weren’t taking the risks they once had, and it showed. Slowly but surely, Parolin grew disappointed with the increasing complacency of his surroundings. He began seeking opportunities abroad.
He thought about moving to New York or London, but those options seemed just a bit too traditional for someone in the advertising game. Looking a bit deeper, Berlin and Amsterdam also caught his eye, and while the prospect of learning German was daunting, firms in Amsterdam were actively seeking native English speakers to further bolster their already global appeal. It didn’t take long for Parolin to find a position that fit, and the next thing he knew, he was buying a one-way ticket to Amsterdam.
If you ask Parolin why he made the move, he’ll tell you frankly: he was seeking moments that pushed him far beyond his comfort zone, moments which had become scarce in Toronto. Perhaps without knowing it, he was following in the footsteps of a completely different group of thought leaders, not those leading the advertising world, but those whose names we recognize unthinkingly today.
Seneca, the Spanish-born philosopher, lived in Egypt and Corsica before finally settling in Rome. Leonardo da Vinci was known for his frequent movements across Italy and beyond in a time when most of his contemporaries were laid to rest in the same town in which they were born. And Steve Jobs will tell you his trip to India as a teenager was nothing short of necessary to the advent of Apple Computer. Many of our world’s heralded creatives, both past and present, credit a great portion of their unique perspective to experiences they had while traveling; without fail, a trip abroad seems to open a floodgate of ideas when even a trickle seemed impossible before.
Parolin agrees. Reflecting back upon his time in limbo, when he could see that the Canadian advertising industry was becoming predictable yet wasn’t sure how to respond, he says, “There’s no way to create forward-thinking work when you feel that way on the inside.” Sometimes a physical change is the only thing that can get you unstuck mentally.
Anyone working in a creative field will tell you that creativity is a muscle that requires exercise: when it goes unused, it becomes limp, weak, and inflexible. In that sense, travel is a sort of quasi-CrossFit, a boot camp designed to stimulate your creativity muscle in ways you never imagined possible. No matter where you are in the world, travel is an insurance policy against monotony, a guarantee that you’ll feel anything but bored. And when it comes to the effect of complacency on creativity, Parolin puts it best: “I’m a firm believer that complacency equals death.”
