Scribble that idea down

Thursday thought: write your ideas down so you will remember them!

Write that idea, that memory jog, that phone number, that assignment you give yourself, that theme of a presentation you are formulating in your head. On a scrap of paper, on a sticky note, so it exists elsewhere than in your brain cells. Just write it down.

Then, unlike many of my scraps of paper, give each context. So when you come back to them, you know why it was your eureka moment, the reason you wrote it for.

Then, implement it.

Story time:

Twenty-four years ago, I hatched the name for my company, while ideating as fast as I was driving (too fast) on a highway, connect2collaborate, so I stopped as soon as I could, to write the name down or else it would be lost forever.

It became mine. No need for trying to recall it. I am so glad I stopped to memorialize it…in ink…on my palm…because I could not find any paper at the time.

LinkedIn pivot: make that idea on that paper scrap, on your hand, wherever, into a new tangent, or better, a theme for your LinkedIn profile. Perhaps you were impressed with a word phrase someone else used and you want to riff off of it for you own use. Perhaps you never really loved that portion of your About section and you found the remedy to make it more like your persona.

We are bombarded with data and tasks all day. Our fascination floats fleetingly. New thoughts, like snowflakes in a snowstorm, cover the now-a-half-hour-old ones.

Tie down these cerebral threads, not always, but just sometimes, the best you come across, enact them, elevate them from scraps of paper to masterpieces to express your “why.”

Tell me if this helps you in any way.

(Thanks to David Winkelman for being the muse behind this Thursday Thought, from a zoom conversation we just had. Yes, I took notes for this.)