What I learned from winning 102,700.00

One year before I represented Switzerland at Eurovision in Stockholm, I won a large radio contest in Vancouver, Canada.

Zoom back two years before - I was accepted for the first time into the 5 month journey, through bootcamp, performances, and a large thesis-like grant application — it was tough, and in the end I didn't make the top 3. I felt like a failure. It took a few months to recover. What did I do wrong? What were the judges looking for? I gave up and said I would never try again, too emotionally demanding and of course I told myself - its all subjective!

My mother is intense. When applications opened two years later, she wrote to me everyday telling me I should re-apply. Her calls were so persistent that I ended up listening to her and applying again. She was...right. Haha. I was accepted into the program again and made a new game plan. This time around, I had changed my artist name and had a brand new album ready to go.

These are some of the things I changed:

Don't do drama

It's easy to get caught in drama, what is this person saying, what does that person think. But I didn't do it this time. I focused on myself, I made sure I was happy. I used my energy to focus on my tasks.

Lift others

I focused on using my platforms to lift the other contestants. I interviewed them and posted about them - this gave me more content to post and it was fun to tell hidden nice stories about the others. I could also learn from what others were doing.

Delegate

I asked for help, and used base grant money to hire people to help me. I hired the winners from the previous year to help me with the marketing plan, I hired an extra designer to organise my press clippings visually, I hired a videographer to create more content around the campaigns.

Focus on what matters

All these points gave me a strong base and created a good environment to focus on what mattered. What mattered was to have a cohesive overall campaign — my campaign was based around nature and it's preservation. For example the songs on my album were all about animals, I had a fundraising campaign for a nature preservation organisation, we had dark animal costumes on stage and the performances were designed to reflect the brashness and depth of nature.

The performance was very important, the flow, the execution, the band. A famous guitarist from Vancouver (who also produced my album) performed with us. User testing and refining this performance was very important as well.

After 5 months of work, I was awarded the top prize.

My videographer Brianne Nord-Stewart filmed, and I edited this video afterward to remember the night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xypb32sXMZo