Kill your darlings
(And your ducks)
Day one. It’s the first day of your creative sprint and you’re brimming. You’re loose, in the zone, and have five ideas banked by end of play.
Day two. Today feels like a research day—everyone loves a moodboard. And despite a heavy amount of post rationalisation, things are lining up.
Day three. Early start. Not quite solved the run-through. You know the first idea is strong, the third is safe, and the fifth is out there. But two and four are a little harder to nail down.
“It’s like this, but if you did that instead.”
“Same as before, but more techie?”
“I just like this image.”
Day four. Early start after a late one. You decide to restructure the entire deck and bake in an evolution → revolution sliding scale. Because by visualising the five routes as a natural, logical progression, they’ll get it.
Day five. The morning of the meeting. Sleep is for losers. Who doesn’t like options? This is more of a territory session anyway. It’s basically a workshop! And as soon as that cleaner finishes hoovering the stairs, you’ll start running through the deck. Oh look, the sun…
You’re in the meeting.
Route one feels like an hour ago.
You hear someone say “similar, but with a twist” and realise it was you.
They go with someone else.
Creative culls are never easy. If we didn’t care about the work, we wouldn’t be in the job. Although having all your ducks in a row might feel reassuring, it can signal a lack of confidence in your work. Speaking from experience (the long way round), If you’ve got five ideas, kill two and four on day one. Despite feeling counter intuitive, it works.
Your subconscious (whatever that means) will recalibrate and regurgitate any sticky solutions from the shallow graves of the weaker ideas, and deploy them into the stronger routes.
Kill your darlings (and your ducks).
