DON'T "kill your darlings." Try this instead.

If you've ever taken a college writing class, you've probably heard the advice: Kill your darlings.

The idea is that you can't get too attached to your own brilliant turns of phrase — because writing that calls attention to itself pulls readers out of the story. They stop thinking about what you're saying and start thinking about how you said it. So, ruthlessly cut it. Kill it. Gone.

It's good advice. But honestly? It's brutal.

I work with speakers, and this comes up constantly. Someone falls in love with their opening. A coach gets attached to a section they spent weeks crafting. And look — often they're right. It is beautiful. But here's the thing about talks: you're working within a brutal time constraint. A TED Talk is roughly 1,500 words. That's it. Every single word has to earn its place and drive the story forward toward your call to action. It's less like writing an essay and more like writing a poem.

So I've stopped telling my speakers to kill their darlings. Instead, I tell them this:

Save it for your book.

It reframes everything. You're not losing something you love — you're protecting it. Setting it aside for the right moment, the right format, the right audience. That gorgeous anecdote that runs two minutes too long? Save it for your book. That poetic passage that belongs in a memoir, not a keynote? Save it for your book.

When you can say that to yourself, editing stops feeling like loss. It feels like curation.

And that makes all the difference.