One of the books I’m currently reading is The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. So far, I have found the book to be awesome but its very “dense”. By that, I mean you can’t read too much in one sitting because every sentence, paragraph and page is packed with so much good information. I was originally tuned into this book by Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Work Week) where it was listed as one of the “fundamental four” in the restricted reading section. It so happened that I have a copy in the library of books I inherited from my Dad and I had been referred to it elsewhere as well so I started it.

Anyway, as I mentioned, the book is packed with great stuff, but what I wanted to highlight today is one particular section that really resonated with me. Here it is:

Ideas are the fruits of your thinking. But they’ve got to be harnessed and put to work to have value. Each year an oak tree produces enough acorns to populate a good-sized forest. Yet, from these bushels of seeds perhaps only one or two acorns will become a tree. The squirrels destroy most of them and the hard ground beneath the tree doesn’t give the few remaining seeds much chance for a start.

So it is with ideas. Very few bear fruit. Ideas are highly perishable. If we’re not on guard, the squirrels (negative-thinking people) will destroy most of them. Ideas require special handling from the time they are born until they’re transformed into practical ways for doing things better.

The book then goes on to list three ways of harnessing and developing ideas: don’t let ideas escape, review your ideas, and cultivate and fertilize your idea. This is definitely good advice. I have been working with ideas in this way even before reading the book. So, here are my thoughts on cultivating brain fruit:

  1. Don’t let ideas escape: make sure you capture them somewhere. I use three different mechanisms for capturing ideas. First, I have a full-size coil-bound notebook I keep with my morning reading material. When I’m reading in the morning, I write, in point form, any ideas that come to mind and any passages from the material I’m reading that I find particularly inspiring. Second, I keep a USB stick on me that I use to hold ideas that are larger in size. This would be things like book outlines, business plans, and draft blog posts. Finally, I keep a little field notebook (and pen) in my pocket at all times. The field notebook has been key as I find that if I don’t write an idea down immediately, I’m likely to lose it. Honestly, I’m amazed at the number of ideas I have. It scares me to think that I’ve had these large quantities of ideas all along and I’ve just been letting them rot on the ground instead of picking them and saving them for later.
  2. Review your ideas: its not enough to save your ideas, you need to review them regularly and then add to them, refine them, and finally, act on them. Some of the “ideas” I save are nothing more than inspirational notes while others are concrete, actionable items. Either way, I find great value in reviewing them regularly. The bigger ideas that I store on the USB stick I tend to review whenever I add to them. As for the two notebooks I keep, I try to review them on the weekend. Depending on the volume of ideas I’ve had over the previous week, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a good half-hour. Maybe more if I act on some of them or if they inspire further ideas (which does happen). At any rate, this is a key step. When I first started recording my ideas, I didn’t go back and review regularly. Over time, I found that I started repeating the same ideas while thinking they were new. The review process keeps the good ideas fresh in your mind and allows you to process and discard the not-so-good ideas.
  3. Cultivate and fertilize your idea: For me, this step has been difficult. I have a natural tendency to procrastinate so even when I have good ideas that are repeatedly brought to my attention, I still may not act them. A good example is this blog post. When I first read the excerpt above, I immediately felt compelled to write this. That was three days after my last post. As you can see, there’s more than three days between posts here. However, my lack of action notwithstanding, this is the “money” step. This is where you flesh out your idea fully by doing research, running your idea by others, prototyping it, and generally moving forward. This is where you bake the pie from the good fruit that you’ve gathered and saved.

Ultimately, we all have ideas. For years, I have lamented my lack of useful ideas when it appears that I’ve had them all along, I just hadn’t been capturing them. Since I’ve started cultivating my ideas, I have outlines for three books, a couple of complementary business models for an internet-based business (stay tuned for more on that) and numerous little “ideas” ranging from inspiring quotes to potential blog posts. Get in the habit of cultivating your brain fruit and soon you’ll be enjoying a bountiful harvest.

- Dave