On my first day of Copywriting class, my colleagues and I were tasked to come up with an idea. We were given a topic and 10 minutes to develop our concept.

This was an awfully long time to come up with an idea I thought. After the ten minutes were up, my professor did not look at a single one of our concepts and proceeded to tell us all of our ideas were shit.

Our homework was to come up with 99 more.

One of the biggest obstacles in any person’s life, no matter the hardships in their past consists of overcoming themselves.

Overcoming yourself? What does that mean?

It means getting over your ego. Not necessarily all together; (That’s impossible for the beautiful and charming human being that you are) however, the capability to swallow it for the sake of a greater good is overcoming yourself it its purest form.

We’ll bring this into industry terms and breakdown why this is the single most essential asset to have in any work environment.

As an Advertising guy, being able to kill one’s baby is a necessary rite of passage. It’s the difference between being capable of working in a good agency/company and being an asset to it.

Now before we go any further into you thinking the Ad industry is completely messed up, (which it is) and everyone who works in it are a bunch of whack jobs. (which we are) I assure you it’s not some kind of secret manifestation the advertisers of the world are coming together in order to perform the next holocaust. The term killing your baby actually refers to the act of letting go of one’s idea because they are too in love with it to see it leading astray on their own.

To put it in perspective, you the professional have a fantastic idea for a campaign you are working on. There is a simple 4 step procedure to the idea process.

1. Birth
2. Love
3. Raising/Nurturing
4. Pride

You give birth to the idea. Here it is. This is mine.

You fall in love with your new brand new baby idea. It’s so beautiful wow.

You rock and cradle your baby in your arms, and raise it into an elaborate spiderweb of conceptual advancements.

This baby is the cure for cancer. It is your crowning achievement, and you won’t let anyone between you and it.

That’s all fine and dandy. Ideas are great. They are the foundation for any huge campaign or viral video; however, they can very easily lead astray. Ideas must be shaped and converted many times in order to reach any form of success. This is where Killing your Babies comes in. It’s become a silent rule amongst my peers that whenever you are told to kill your baby — do it.

No matter how great your world changing idea may be, you hear the magic words and are forced to succumb to its power. In your head, the concept may be amazing, but there’s many thing to take into account. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to someone else. It may just not be right for your target demographic. Make sure you look at all angles before you go ahead and do anything with your concept. Be careful because this can be a complicated task all by yourself.

Luckily that’s why you have your good friends to tell you to throw your baby in the dumpster. Well, maybe it’s better to pull a MJ and hang it out the window. —too far?

You never truly want to obliterate any idea you have. As it can be used to accumulate into a better, greater idea farther down the road. The best advice I’ve received is to write down every idea you have. No matter how small. This ties into the 100 idea theory heavily enforced amongst my peers. Force yourself to come up with 100 ideas per project. It’s hard at first, but once you start rolling, one idea leads into another and 15 more emerge.

I guarantee you every successful campaign out there was the result of hours on end of non stop ideas and many killed babies. It takes a thick skin to be shutdown frequently on what you thought was the best concept ever, but trust me. It’s for the best, and I’m sure you’ll forget all about it when you think up your next million dollar idea two minutes later.

So toughen up and take it, and never be afraid to hand it right back out. Because in this industry, the people who can’t handle objections will be gone in a week.