Kill your own babies.
We must detach and be prepared to kill the things we birth, if not, others will end up doing it for us.
Babies are anything we get possessive over: ideas, drafts, projects, clients, strategies that used to work. The two killers are sunk cost and ego. Neither keeps alive what should be dead. If we won't end it, the market or time will, more painfully and on someone else's schedule. Birth it, back it, end it.
- 01For anything you've owned more than a month, ask quarterly: would I start this today if I weren't already in it?
- 02If you can't name three current reasons it should exist, it shouldn't.
- 03Sunk cost doesn't make the case. Past success doesn't either.
- 04When you kill something, you own the ending out loud. No quiet shelving.