In a Blizzard, Build an Igloo

The Importance of Capturing Ideas

"An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself."

— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Dear friends,

What do you do with the ideas which inspire you?

Personally, I capture them.

I have a page in my Notion where I curate these fleeting thoughts.

Ideas are curiously fickle. They tend to disappear if you don’t capture them on the fly. Easy to hook, harder to reel in.

Below is a screenshot of my Ideation page in Notion. Whenever something moves me, I pop it in.

I organise them into loose topics, but the important thing is to snare them while they are there.

"To have a great idea, have a lot of them."

— Thomas Edison

Why Capture Ideas?

If your thoughts shape you, then it could be said that you are your thoughts.

Yet thought has a troubled place in the modern world.

We live in a barrage of inputs, which are barely processed until the next comes in.

It turns the brain into a reactionary machine, emotionally reacting to everything but processing very little.

This societal norm leaves us little more than branches in a blizzard of a billion inputs. To deepen your roots, you need to counteract the madness.

Marcus Aurelius said: ” “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

The trouble nowadays is that we have quantity of thought and make little time for quality.

This is why I capture ideas.

I read a lot and listen to numerous podcasts. Much of it is helpful, but who hasn’t reached the end of a page and wondered, dam, what the hell did I just read?

No, for something to take effect in me, I need it to reach me deeper.

I need to extract it from its source and bring it into the realm of my life and being.

That is where my Notion comes in. I recognise my superfluousness enough to know my own weaknesses.

To deepen takes effort.

It’s easy to feel motivated by an idea in the moment.

It’s harder to introject it into your spirit, to invite it to be a part of your rewriting.

So many of us become fixed in who we have already become. That is not how I want to live. I want to be always in a state of becoming.

That means:

1. Staying open to new things

2. Making an effort to capture ideas

3. Having the discipline to process them later

So my question: if you are your thoughts, what are you doing to develop them?

"For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he."

— Proverbs 23:7, The Bible

How Do I Catch My Thoughts?

If you press on my Notion, it takes you to a page like the one below.

As you can see, it’s like a scrapbook. When I’m bustling about town and something strikes me, in it goes. Many of the things which inspire us are encountered on the fly.

For instance, this week, I heard this idea in a podcast:

“You are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.”

— Larry Winget

It resonated with me because we often want to run from our weaknesses, failures, or previous versions of ourselves.

Yet the problems we encounter are the most valuable.

They are the laboratory of your life.

They are the opportunity for you to find your own solutions.

We spend too much time wishing they were not there or avoiding them, and not enough time thinking about who we might become should we solve them or how we might help someone else by passing on the knowledge we accrue.

And that is the thing about ideas.

Few things are more powerful.

They are the medium through which your reinvention takes place.

The precursor of your becoming.

Are you making an effort to capture them? Are you activating them in the service of the world?

In a blizzard, build an igloo.

Your mind is your house.

• Capture your ideas.

• Introject them.

• Know yourself better.

They may take you where you want to go; they may not.

But they will serve you in your own becoming.

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come."

— Victor Hugo, The History of a Crime