Kill your best ideas, save yourself instead
The brutal art of learning to tell yourself no
As a multi-hyphenate, there’s always 50 million things I want to do.
And because I know myself and my ability to create something end to end, I’m often always planning towards bringing those 50 million things to life.
But this year, I actually had to tell myself no and cancel several projects I spent months working on in order to save myself.
I killed a total of 8 projects at least this year.
None of them were easy choices, and I struggled with feeling like a failure. But ultimately when I took a step back and held a magnifying glass up to my vision, it was brutally clear that I had to stop.
Knowing when you need to cancel, postpone, or completely put an idea on hold is a skill that takes time to learn. You’ll most likely burn yourself out hundreds of times until you simply realize one day “Wait, I actually don’t have to do any of this.”
You’ll find peace in Beyoncé-ifying your work and never dropping ‘the visuals’, except your visuals will be one of your best ideas that you know needs to die.
In this process, I’ve come up with my own formula on when an idea of mine gets a yes, or when I have to kill it in order to save myself. It starts with these questions:
