When I was first offered the role of Chief Executive at Aberdeen Performing Arts, I had just returned from living and working in Australia. It should have been a straightforward decision. It wasn’t.

My honest reaction was that I might be taking a strong role in a place I wasn’t sure about.

I’m a Glaswegian, but most of my working life has been spent in London and Edinburgh. Cities I knew. Cities that felt familiar. Aberdeen, if I’m being candid, felt like an unknown—and one I wasn’t entirely convinced about.

But I also knew this: the job itself was exactly what I had been working towards. The scope, the responsibility, the chance to make a difference. And that led me to a simple trade-off.

Better to take a role with real substance in a place I wasn’t yet sure about than settle for something less in a city that felt comfortable.

Looking back, I think that way of thinking is more common than we admit. We place too much weight on geography—on where we think we should be—rather than on the substance of what we’re actually doing.

Aberdeen audiences with real appetite changed my feelings

We convince ourselves that........

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