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Kill All Your Darlings

Behance Team

Kill All Your Darlings

Jul 21, 2009 -

Every new idea for a product or service has a certain level of intoxication or romance built in – but often this is just the pure charm of novelty. Half the appeal of any new endeavor is that it’s not the project we’re in the middle of executing, where we’ve already run into 42 unexpected challenges that are slowly chipping away at the glamour of the original idea that started it all.

The key to making the ideas happen – and moving businesses forward – is understanding that we can’t make every idea happen. Because bandwidth is limited, we must ruthlessly examine every new business idea from all angles before deciding to commit valuable resources to making it happen.

Thane Calder, co-president and co-founder of Montreal-based digital branding agency Cloudraker, believes in the importance of calling it like it is: “As ideas develop, it's important to have ‘no-bullshit’ sessions to challenge the ideas from the outset.  It's also important to know when to pull the plug…This is tricky because persistence is often the key ingredient for success but in the end, so is good judgment.”

Killing off the ideas that just aren’t working is, of course, easier said than done. Our ideas are often part of the very fabric of who we are – and shedding them can be an emotional challenge.

As Ariel Broggi, the co-founder and Creative Director of Fred Beverages, a unique bottled water company, puts it: "Coping with the loss of a loved idea remains the greatest challenge. Saying goodbye is so hard that many creatives simply can’t do it, myself included. We will spend the rest of our days lugging around a pile of mortally wounded concepts that we hope to someday miraculously revive. It will regrettably never happen.”

Although it’s an ongoing challenge, we must strive to balance idea execution and idea enchantment.

 

***The Behance team researches productivity and leadership in the creative world. These entries are adapted and edited by Jocelyn K. Glei from the Behance team's past articles and research. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network, the Action Method project management application, the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.

 

Tags: behance, ideas, innovation, persistance, products, quitting

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