Waiting has always been the worst.
I can’t do anything. I’ve done everything I can. To do anything else would weaken my hand.
Strategic calm required.
The Presentation
The presentation went well. Nods. Encouraging smiles. Our deck shared beyond the immediate group. We were the last to present — they allowed us that.
All good signs. And yet.
Experience suggests caution.
The waiting is the worst kind of not knowing. The dark place I go when uncertainty feels like vertigo. Freefall. Nerves on full alert. Action isn’t possible. There’s nothing to be done. Caught in the in-between time, nothing to fill an unfillable void.
A void that, if I let it, can completely own me.
Not Dead Yet
I’ve learned not to let it.
I find a diversion. I start a project that promises some completely unrelated future success. The project puts me in the flow — that private place of joy where thinking about what we do, how it helps others, how it advances the cause, makes time move again.
A couple of days pass. The anxiety still hangs at the edges. But mostly managed. There are stretches now where I’ve forgotten the waiting entirely.
Then the email arrives. Subject line oblique. I click.
We’re a finalist. Not dead yet.
Moving Targets
I book a flight and fire back a note asking who else is in contention. They’re not comfortable revealing that. But happy to talk.
So we talk. About fees. About goals that have shifted over the course of the process. (Iteration is always in play.)
About the decision makers — who, it turns out, aren’t aligned. Some are pushing hard for an almost fictional storytelling approach. Others want something grounded in technology.
The winner, my contact tells me, will offer a balanced approach that includes both.
I’ve heard this before. It’s a losing proposition. A brief written by a committee with conflicting views, asking for something that pleases everyone and therefore pleases no one.
You’ve heard this before. So have I.
Back to What Works
So I go back to my roots.
We design a survey. We go out and interview actual users — outside the biggest grocery stores in town. We listen. We write and illustrate a presentation around a single organizing concept: We Asked.
The result?
We won.
Always Somewhere to Go
I still get the vertigo. The freefall feeling when there’s nothing to be done but wait. I still feel that flutter — what a client once described perfectly as a bad butterfly in the chest — and I just turned eighty.
You don’t outgrow it. You just get better at knowing what to do with it.
The answer, every time, is the same: go make something. Not to distract yourself. Because making things is what you know how to do. Because the flow is real, and the waiting can’t follow you there. And because the work you do while you’re waiting for one thing is often what prepares you to win it.
Creative people have an advantage in the in-between time that most people don’t recognize: we always have somewhere to go.