Ideas

Ideals are fragile. But not only are ideas fragile, they are also elusive. Not only are ideas easily quashed, as Jony Ive related to us so eloquently, but ideas are just as easily lost. But they're not lost because of some great conflict, or the burning of some great historical library. They're lost before they even come to be in this world, lost before they can even be be scrawled over a piece of paper.

In many cases, the human mind is the most powerful computer we know of today; yet it is simultaneously one of the most flawed. It's like a supercomputer, but one that will lose half of its old data and 90% of its new data every minute. It's stunning how little remember from day to day, from hour to hour, and even from minute to minute.

At work yesterday, I came up with a topic to write about in my blog, along with two supporting points for my thesis. That's effectively 80% of the work that goes into writing a short blog article. I get home at 9pm, head to my desk to write an outline, and ... fail. I have no idea what I had been so excited to write about, just 6 hours earlier. This kind of accident happens all the time: to me, to you, to everyone around us. Isn't it really quite a shame?

It doesn't have to be this way. No, we unfortunately can't change the way we've been designed; what we can do is help our brain out with our hand.

Just write it down. When an idea pops up into your mind, just write it down. If you're in the car, speak into a recording device. Seemingly everyone and their grandma has a smartphone these days (although I don't, but that's another story), so you already have both a "notebook" and a recorder on you at all times!

I remember a friend telling me that Charlie Cheever (early Facebook employee and founder of Quora) would write down every nuisance he'd encounter in his every day life. He was searching for a startup idea, and wasn't going to let his fickle memory get in the way of it. Ideas for writing, or even just simple realizations in life, are really just the same way.

Without writing, we forget. Not forgetting then, is easy. Just write, right away.