How often do you have to deal with unexpected situations?

Have you ever thought about the best way to deal with them ? 

I feel like sometimes life is all about dealing with these situations. Note that I specifically didn’t say “problem”, if there is a solution it’s not really a problem, just an unexpected situation. With that said, let me tell you a story. 

A few months ago I had one of the best opportunities in my career. Louis Vuitton reached out to me to work with them for the Met Gala, they wanted me to make videos with the celebrities they were dressing. This was Monday, exactly a week before. As you can imagine, I was extremely excited for this even though I immediately had a first obstacle. At this time I was at the end of the process of my visa to work in the US and my appointment at the embassy was scheduled a day after the Met. It’s when I started saying to myself that the best will happen, even if this means that I won’t be able to do this job. 

The next day I woke up at 6 am and found a new slot to reschedule my visa appointment for Thursday that week, and my only chance was to have my passport back Friday and fly Saturday. And guess what, by some miracle that’s exactly what happened. Saturday night I was already in New York ready to shoot. 

On Monday, the day of the shoot, I was feeling great. In my head at this point nothing could go wrong after this first stress with the visa. When I arrived on location I was introduced to the photographer who would be sharing the space with me. Just before the Met, all their guests would come to us to create the content. As the team was building the set I realized that the space that I had to film was getting smaller and smaller. I ended up having a little corner for me, it was not ideal but I had the best attitude about it. I was telling myself that I would make the most out of what I had and like always I would do my best work. 

The first person to arrive was HoYeon Jung, she was adorable. I welcomed her to my set with a big smile and the best energy. One thing that you have to know about my set is that the vibe is always going to be the best. It only took me a minute to brief and film her. I had to be quick and to be honest I couldn’t be quicker. After her, all the guests started arriving and at some point Emma Stone was next to my set waiting for her turn. Everyone was super nice and I had the best time filming with them. 

After finishing capturing everything, we had to run to the base camp to start editing. When shooting for this type of event the content has to be delivered as quickly as possible. As we arrive at the base camp, around 7pm I immediately start backing up everything and working on it. I was working on a specific video that I had to remove the background of everything single video, frame by frame. Two hours into my editing another unforeseen obstacle happened. For some unknown reason my project couldn’t not be saved, so when I quit the software and came back to it everything was gone. Two hours of painful repetitive work gone.

At this time I had two options: Be mad, have a bad attitude and then work on myself to not be mad anymore. Or I could let myself be mad for one second, find a solution, restart and keep working hard on it. Well, I chose the second option and kept working on it. At around 10pm we left the base camp and I went back to my hotel to keep working on it. I was asked to deliver the videos by 4pm the next day so I couldn’t lose a minute. I went to bed around 2am and woke up at 6am, it was intense. The hard part here is that I kept having that same problem. I don’t have much time to learn how to deal with it, so I kept finding ways to work around that and make it work. Even with the obstacles I faced, I still delivered the videos in time – the last video was supposed to be ready for the next day and was ready by the end of that same day. 

After all of that the job was done and I was just extremely happy and proud of the way that I handled these unexpected situations. This experience would have not been the same if I had let myself be eaten by the stress caused by the obstacles along the way. So let’s try to see these “problems” as challenges that we are perfectly capable of handling them the best way.

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