The days after France.

It's been a wonderful, hellish, crazy, challenging, frustrating, satisfying, mind numbing two weeks after France. Those of you who are wired to me on Facebook, must have witnessed the crazy market share numbers that have been fluctuating and soaring on a daily basis, depicting my stress-o-meter. Well, to be fair, never in my life have I felt so pressured. Pressured for something that you have to deliver and a hell lot more pressured for something that needs to be delivered by others. Now I understand why so many good CEOs are so hands-on and have so many sleepless nights. By the way, I'm not a CEO.

But having said that, it's also been fulfilling because we're growing in accountability towards our client. Pardon my crudeness but the account had been like a bout of bad 'diarrhea'. The amount of things that needed to be churned out - strategies, creative, production, material - waited for no man. And in order to avoid a crisis much later, accuracy and speed are utmost important. Unfortunately, that remains as a very idealistic concept in local agencies. People tell me, this is normal. Agency is like that wan lah. Or is it? Even if it is, we have every opportunity to make it not like this. But I don't even want to go into housekeeping right now. The important thing is great work done on time. So... we're just gonna focus on that till after Christmas. I brace myself to receive some letters from those who couldn't cut the heat. Oh well, life goes on. Only heat and pressure in the furnace will filter the impurities from pure steel. We'll see :) I am optimistic.

Anyway, in the midst of our busy-ness. We've received news that we've won a recent pitch for a regional account. Wowwee. That's really something to uplift the spirit in the agency. As far as I'm concern, money or no... it's a pretty reputable account that ought to provide us a lot of opportunities to showcase Dentsu's capability. Well, will announce when it's made official :)

Right now, I'm gonna crash. Been awake for the past 24 hours, arrived at Tokyo this morning. And darn, I miss this place. And the food... they're so therapeutic. Not to mention the shopping :) If you're here, check out FrancFranc's new store at Aoyama (with Monocle attached). It's aweeesome.

Good night, world. Sleep tight and let your mind repose with the silence that blankets the city with a heavy velvet of darkness.

***I'm gonna leave you with an excerpt (that's profoundly observed in a psychological study) that I read today on flight***

And even when we do check our knowledge, we often mislead ourselves. We focus on those snippets of information that we do possess, or can easily obtain, but ignore all of the elements that are missing, leaving us with the impression that we do understand everything we need to. The illusion (of thinking you know as much as you think you know) is remarkably persistent.

Our tendency to make this error isn't limited to our thoughts and beliefs about physical devices and systems. It happens whenever we have a big project to complete, a problem to solve, or an assignment to do. We must overcome the temptation to dive in and get started rather than examine our understanding of the task and its requirements.

***So. Remember to escape that illusion***