Put the project first

What are you sacrificing as a professional and a creative when you let the traps of competitiveness and emotional attachment catch you?

“When we become overly attached to the premature version of the work, we do a disservice to the project’s potential.”

Rick Rubin

That last draft you keep shoe-horning new ideas into might be an anchor to a place you simply shouldn’t be.

You also might be stapled to an undeveloped version of yourself, trying to justify a cover story that has become an entirely different narrative.

We all have the potential to:

·       Prematurely decide a brief’s merits

·       Be our most immature creative self

And where does that leave us? Where does it leave the work we’re trying to do?

Stuck in a version of work that, if left unchecked, allows:

·       The politics of personality

·       Presumption

·       Quitting time

·       Wanting to see something succeed too much

·       Taking a job too seriously

·       The desire to reduce risk

·       Ass kissing

·       Schadenfreude

To drag the work to unhappy places.

For its part, the project doesn’t care what you think. It’s not overgrown with these emotion-based influences.

It just wants to speak for itself.  

To live longer than:

·       The formwork it is created in

·       Last week’s heated conversation

·       Flash-in-the-pain ideas

·       Disorganisation

·       Personalities

·       Disorganised personalities

·       Your fight with your most hated colleague

Put the project first.

You and everybody else will (eventually) thank you for it.

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