Acronym

For my birthday, a close friend gave me a small handmade book. She's a constant note-writer. In fact, every time she leaves for a business trip, she pens short notes to her children and husband, but she doesn't give the notes to them. Until recently, she hid them in her jewelry box. Now she writes them in "little pretty books." She's deep.

Several years ago, on her 30th birthday, she spent three hours on the floor "remembering." She went through her whole life--year by year, everything she could remember. She's encouraged me to do the same. I'm not sure I have three hours between deadlines! But that's a conversation for another day...

So I've started writing in my little handmade book, which has become the home for my "great ideas." My mind kept returning to my little book this afternoon as Bruce Turkel spoke in the Great Ideas General Session. "We all have the same tools," he said, for coming up with great ideas. Unfortunately, great ideas don't always come when you want them. You can't just coax them out by sheer will. The trick, he says, is to keep trying again. Be ready to catch that idea when it comes falling out of the sky, whether you're in the shower, in the car, cooking, whatever.

That's where my pretty little purple book has come in handy. I seem to find my great ideas on the way to work after dropping off my kids at school. I'm not necessarily advocating writing while driving, but that's what I've been doing--capturing my "great ideas," my mediocre ones, and the ones that seem quite ridiculous upon later inspection, and recording them before they're lost in the shuffle of publication deadlines, consulting projects, meetings, and family responsibilities.
Some of those ideas will be used, some won't. But what matters is that I still have some. I'm expecting to capture several over the next couple of days.