When I was 13 years old, about 30 years ago, I noticed that I would come up with what I thought were great ideas, then promptly forget about them. That’s when I started carrying around a small pad of paper and pencil (this was before everyone had mobile devices). Whenever I had an interesting idea, I would write it down.
Eventually, computers and the internet became ubiquitous and I started entering my ideas into a computer document. The list grew and grew. At its peak, I think I had about 1,200 ideas on the list. I began going into the list and pruning out bad ideas and elaborating upon good ideas. The list got down to 647 ideas.
At this point, I drew up my 10-year plan. It was time to actually make use of the ideas. The idea of my 10-year plan was to give away the 80% of ideas that I had no intention of acting upon, while setting things in motion to implement the 20% of ideas that excited me the most.
You can see the ideas that I’m giving away on my StormShock Ideas blog.
You can see my progress on the ideas that I’m implementing at StormShock.com.
Do you also have a lot of ideas? I encourage everyone to create their own idea file. It can be a simple pad of paper. Or it can be as complex as a database stored on a cloud server. The point is to write down all of your ideas, no matter how silly you may think they are. Then you can revisit your list of ideas whenever you’re ready to take on a new project and pick out the one that excites you. When you find that diamond of an idea, you’d be glad you wrote it down.
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