The art of staying calm in the storm

We were working on a proposal for a new project, and the deadline was in only three hours. It was a Friday evening, and everyone was running on empty. In that nervous atmosphere, with papers all over the room, each person reading a different chapter and noticing even more mistakes, the most common sentence was: “We have to re-write everything, this doesn’t make any sense.”

I was 25 at the time, and this was as far as possible from my perfect Friday evening. I checked my phone every now and then, just to see messages from my friends updating me on where they were. Every new notification led to more anxiety, but at the same time I understood we were working on something really important. I was honoured to have been selected to work on that high profile project.

“Come on people, let’s focus, just two more hours and we are looking at a long weekend,” my Professor sounded like a coach during an important game.

And while everyone was running around and filling the air with panic, one of the postdocs was sitting at the corner desk, taking over the chapters people reviewed and making changes in the main document. I knew him as an expert, so I was confused as to why would he do such a manual task — he surely knows more than any of us, he should be the one reviewing the protocols, and maybe I could take over what he was doing.

I approached him with this suggestion, and the first thing I noticed was that he actually took a second to look at me. In the entire chaos, I don’t remember…