Where’s A Lifeguard When You Need One?

They say – and I do too – that the best way to figure out if somebody’s up to a challenge is to throw that person off the pier into the deep end.

If he (or she, in which case you’d better push her off the pier gently) can stay afloat, and if the sharks aren’t particularly hungry, then you know that he (or she) is up to it.

This week, I find myself in the water, and the sharks are smelling blood.

The next five days will be game-changing for my career.

Either I will be completely shattered, left with little or no confidence in my creative abilities, destined to be a follower…

Or I will come out believing I’m ready for bigger things.

In the last three months or so, I’ve moved from being a small fish in a large pond to a (relatively) bigger fish in a smaller pond. The move from Lowe Lintas to Linteractive has brought with it serious responsibility and expectations – to lead a creative renaissance in our digital wing, helping to build it into a powerhouse that’ll chart the agency’s course for the future.

On Friday, we go into a large, extremely competitive pitch. The spends are huge and the pressure is immense. The product is a parity one, a category I’ve worked on fairly often before – which means that it’s even tougher to crack.

The nerves are jangling.

This will, after all, be the first time I present creative at a pitch – not counting freelance pitches, of course.

This will be the acid test.

For the next five days, my creative partner and I will live, breathe, eat and sleep with this pitch. We will take the brief and turn it upside-down, inside-out. We’ll squeeze it dry. We’ll look at it in a mirror. We might just tear it up and start afresh. All for that one idea that’ll hopefully win us the business, and the recognition we deserve.

And if there’s any insight I might have gleaned from these last couple of days, it’s this.

You may spend your whole life preparing for something; but when it comes, you’re never as prepared as you thought you would be.