How Do You Respond to Pressure?

As I write this point I am under a heavy deadline. Today was my day to contribute to the VaynerMedia blog and for one reason or another I completely forgot about this responsibility until… now. I have a conference call that starts in 10 minutes (as of this exact keystroke) and my calendar is completely accounted for from that point on. With that in mind, I need to have this blog post completely done in less than 10 minutes. Mind you, I am not trying to put out an inferior product (it is for you to decide at the end of this post), but it is simply the reality of the situation. I spent the first 3 minutes of my 13 minute window brainstorming ideas and seeing if something would come to mind.. it didn’t.

I then sat there and took a look outside of myself. I saw an individual who was under an extreme amount of pressure and had very little time to work with. I thought to myself, “AJ, you like to think of yourself as someone who responds well to pressure, well now is a great time to prove it.” So again, my mind raced – what was I going to blog about?

Then it hit me. The actual topic of being under pressure is something that has always interested me, and the concept of “live blogging” a situation in which I was under pressure would be something worth reading. I promise this post is not going to be edited, that’s why the grammar is off and the thoughts are so scattered. Another factor playing into this blog post is the fact that I am constantly being pinged on AOL instant messenger and having co-workers approach my desk asking if I have a second… I am respectfully passing in order to complete this post. Then again, these distractions are in fact helping me write this post.

One factor that I find interesting is that I no longer feel stressed. I have a good 5 minutes left to work on this post and I feel like I have already provided something worth reading. My curiosity is peaking at this point. I wonder what others would have done with 13 minute time frame and pressure to get a post out. There are a lot of different options and I wonder if “resorting” to one option or another truly represents the way you handle pressure in general. Is the fact that I am “live blogging” a situation in which I truly made a mistake a cop out? Is it something creative? Is it something lazy? Is it something that was in fact harder than merely coming up with a topic and writing a quick post about? Maybe it doesn’t matter at all. Maybe I just took the time I had, came up with an idea and put out a piece of content the most won’t read. Or maybe it does matter, and this blog post will be read by a large group of people.

Again I apologize for the lack of structure, and time put into this post. Also for reference, the image associated with this post was one of the first things I found via google images when I typed in pressure.

And…. posted, with a minute to spare.