The "Kill Your Darlings" Mantra for Masterwork Creation

Kill Your Darlings. It’s an old writers mantra (credit: William Faulkner) which speaks to the fact that to make your magic real you need to delete everything from your creative project except for that which is absolutely astonishing. Masterwork is much more about what you leave out than put in. I'm truly super excited over the upcoming release of my new book The Robot and the Gardener: Being Fully Human in an Artificial Age (Penguin Random House). It's a parable and it's different (by f...

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  Hi, it's Robin Sharma and welcome to Daily Mastery. This is my short form podcast where I'll walk you through the insights, methodologies, and tactics that I've shared with many of the world's most successful people as their mentor, including celebrity billionaires, NBA superstars, world-class artists, and global humanitarians. I hope you find great value in today's episode.

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  There's a message I want to offer to you that I think is going to be valuable to you as you create your masterworks. And the message is, it's been attributed to various people, including William Faulkner and Stephen King, and it's about killing your darlings. And you might say, Robin, you know, you are so careful about vocabulary. And, you know, I really do believe words have tremendous power. Why am I talking about something such as killing your darlings? But killing your darlings is advice given to writers, which is, no matter how precious you think your writing is, maybe it's a chapter, you're

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  in love with it, you think it's fantastic, you always have to be willing to delete that chapter from the work for the greater good of the work. And that doesn't just apply to artists, and it doesn't just apply to writers, it applies to anyone who is in the creative field. And if you're pushing code, if you're a startup entrepreneur, if you're running a big business, like a lot of people in the circle of legends, if you're doing screenplays, if you're a movement maker, which you probably are, you've got to be willing to let go of things you think are amazing for the sake of the greater good

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  of the creative project. You know, less is often more, less is often more. And so sometimes we create this content, we think it's fantastic, and we won't let go of it, and it just creates complexity. Brings me to another point, which is, it often takes a lifetime to learn to make something look really simple. And that's when you see a real master. If you look at, maybe it's a Pablo Picasso, maybe it's a Jean Michel Basquiat. You can tell a master because a master knows what not to put in. If you look at beginners and amateurs, what they do is they put everything into the painting, they put everything into the business, they

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  chase every opportunity, they put everything into the screenplay, they put everything into the restaurant menu if their chefs are running a hospitality empire. But what mastery is, is you know your craft and feel so much that you know exactly what to put in so that the essence of your vision is captured. And that often takes 20 years, that often takes 30 years. That's why sometimes, you know, and another point is, you know, it was Bob Dylan who said, don't criticize what you don't understand. That's why often it takes a master

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  to understand, to appreciate mastery. It often takes a master to appreciate mastery. And I've been guilty of that in my own life. I'll go to an art gallery and I'll see something, maybe it's a Damien Hirst or something like that. And I don't really understand what went into it. So I just go, oh, that's a, that's, that's a big shark in formaldehyde. Why is that known as, you know, this work of art? And, you know, it's, it's simple because there was great expertise that went inside of it. So you've got to be willing to kill your darlings. Just remember that. I mean, you've got to be willing to push for simplicity

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  versus pushing for complexity. And often mastery lives in simplicity. Final thing I'd say to you is, John Irving said, and David Ogilvy, the great ad man also said, he said, a great copywriter is a great editor. And it's really important to remember that, you know, it's, it's, it's on the same theme that I'm talking about, which is what makes a masterpiece is you're willing to go draft after draft after draft, polishing, editing, refining, changing. If I, if I could show you, you know, some of the manuscript

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  pages I have in there, there's so many markings on it. And this is round number 10. But a great writer is a great editor. And I'm not saying I'm a great writer, I'm just trying to offer a point to you, which is you want to, in your business, you want to be constantly optimizing and refining. In your creative work, you want to constantly be editing. In your personal life, you want to constantly be iterating, you know, cleaning out what's no longer working and assessing what is working really, really well, so that you're constantly in progress and moving towards your mastery.

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  Hi, it's Robin Sharma. I hope you've received strong value from today's episode. I encourage you to read my latest book, The Everyday Hero Manifesto, which is helping people from right across the world live soaring lives. If you'd like to go into further learning, you can head over to robinsharma.com, or you can download my free ebook, The World Changers Manifesto. And when you do that, you'll also get full access to the Everyday Hero Training Formula, which is a complete system to help you upgrade your productivity, positivity, impact, and the quality of your life. Have an outstanding day.