Note from Tongal: "The Slump" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the In Your Own Words Tongal Blog Project. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and stay tuned for more opportunities to Pitch a topic and write for the Tongal Blog!
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Congratulations, your idea received an award! You are the most creative person on the planet and a big national brand has decided to reward that creativity in the form of money! Now that this achievement train has left the station, sadness will never again be able to hop on board. It’s great to be you!
Beaming with this confidence, you submit the maximum number of ideas to every open project and then against all odds you don’t win any of them. It’s a downer, but you shake it off because you can’t expect to win every time. After all, there are lots of other creative people here. You’ll get them next time.
Then next time… you don’t get them. In fact, you don’t win any projects over the course of the next month, or the month after that, or even the month after that. You are the least creative person in the world. You become bitter. You change your profile picture because you don’t want brands to see your face. After all, your face is the face of a failure. You stop buying toilet paper because that’s what print-outs of your finalist emails are for now. You are in a dreaded “Tongal Slump.”
I know the signs; I’ve been there multiple times and I’m here today to share with you my top 3 tips for slump survival and how to stay motivated.
Tip Number 1: Choose a nemesis.
People who are better adjusted than me tell me I should only compete against my previous self, but past me was pretty good at winning so competing with him seems hard. That’s when a nemesis comes in handy. This way, even when I don’t win I can still be happy that my nemesis also didn’t win, and that’s why I personally like to choose a nemesis that is also in a slump. On the off-chance that they end their slump before I do, I let my thirst for revenge serve as the ultimate motivator. If you’re really lucky, you may even discover a begrudging respect for your nemesis and the two of you can create the sort of frenemy relationship that inspires great literature.
Tip Number 2: Rediscover life outside of Tongal.
After a couple of
Tip Number 3: Get your unique perspective on.
One of the joys of Tongal is that you get to submit ideas for commercials that you’d actually want to see. Even though it’s important to read the briefs and get a sense of what the brand is going for, it’s very easy when you’re in a slump to start trying so hard to please the brand that you end up submitting ideas that are devoid of any originality. Remember that when you’re in a slump, you have nothing to lose, so save at least a couple of ideas for things that you think only you could enjoy. Even if the brand doesn’t choose your weird stuff you might inspire yourself. A non-winning concept could spark your imagination in new ways that could lead you to go out and create something on your own, thus ending your slump in a different way!
So there you have it, my 3 tips for surviving a Tongal Slump, and if none of those work you can always just wait till Tongal hosts a contest for blog ideas and pitch a blog piece about your failures (they love that meta stuff).
