I’ve had my fair share of pressure over the years. From peer pressure at boarding school, to financial pressure, to the familiar pressures of FOMO, I’ve been through it all.

But the pressure I remember best, with some fondness, was the daily pressure cooker of hard deadlines at a print newspaper.

If only all pressure was like that. Absolute. Pure. Immovable. Unifying.

Deadline was our sovereign, before whom we bowed in unity. Rules might be for breaking, but deadline was for making.

From my first job as a “prac student” (an intern, in today’s lingo) at the Daily Dispatch in East London, to my “real” jobs as a sub-editor on the newsdesk of the Pretoria News and The Star in Johannesburg, everyone knew exactly when deadline was.

Every person obeyed it, working towards it from early morning until the printing presses started rolling.

When those enormous machines rolled into action, the pressure shifted onto the operators. They had their own immovable beast of a deadline.

The machines printed thousands of copies at high speed, with absolute precision. The smallest glitch would mean the machine must be stopped, the error fixed, and the machine recalibrated and restarted.

After printing, the newspapers were loaded onto trucks and into planes for delivery, again on a tight deadline.

Before the Internet delivered news at lightning speed, readers waited anxiously for their newspaper, not just for daily news, lottery numbers, and horoscopes, but for the rand-dollar exchange rate, the oil price, and other vital data.

Many people making their living in the news business today will know little of this pressure cooker world, where every person in a long, complex chain pulled together to produce content. That is a pity.

But today’s “content creators” have their own pressures. In a round-the-clock news and information cycle, articles can be uploaded, shared, changed and updated in seconds.

Back in the day, if a journalist made a mistake in a story, there was no chance of correcting it before the next print edition.

You had to live with your errors — “howlers”, as we called them. Somehow, the embarrassment of seeing your error in black and white was a lesser evil than holding on to your copy for a minute longer, and risk missing your deadline.

The newsroom environment was a great fit for me. It combined chaos and intensity with the unity and precision I desired.

What a thrill it was to cope with the pressure and meet deadline every day. The daily pressure humbled and empowered me. It taught me to be a team player, in a way no sport or sibling rivalry could.

In the newsroom, I learned to handle the heat. Deadline was the anvil on which I was forged.

I am a vulnerable little flower a lot of the time. But put me under immense pressure, and you will see the steel.