Idea Books

8 Tips for Thinking & Learning #1

This advice comes from the excellent book, Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt.

It should never be out of your reach. Keep it in the front basket of your shopping cart when you go buy groceries. It should be on the table at the restaurant when you go out to eat. Leave it on your nightstand when you're sleeping. Get one that will fit easy in your pocket.

You never know when the right side of your brain, what Andy Hunt refers to as the Rich Mode of your brain, will bestow insight and information. Chances are that it will not happen when you are sitting at your keyboard waiting for it to happen. You have to be ready.

Buy yourself a notebook. It can be a small notebook. Make sure you have a pen with it. Whenever you get an idea, jot it down. Maybe it's a dumb idea, maybe it isn't. That's not important. So many thoughts are fleeting and it's best to capture them when they are fresh. Write them all down. Haven't you ever had a great idea, but when it was time to do something about it, all you could remember was that you had a great idea, not the idea itself?

The ideas can be anything. Did you hear something on the radio about a topic you wanted to know more about? Jot it down and Google it when you have the chance. Are you in the middle of reading a book and you think of a question? Jot it down. Do you have an idea for an email? Jot it down. Do you have an idea for a product? Jot it down. Again, you should jot down every idea. No exceptions.

Here's the best part: the more you jot down your ideas, the more you'll have. Your brain likes to have a task and once you've trained it to know that ideas are important, something that should be kept and tracked, your brain will happily supply you with more. When you don't treat your ideas as important, you want notice when you have a good one.