Countdown to Millions

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m starting a weekly series of posts showing you how you can think like an entrepreneur. These aren’t meant to be get rich quick scenarios, these are not things like “make millions using Google AdWords,” these are all little things, that when put together will increase your creativity and help you to start thinking like an entrepreneur. With that said, my first tip (if you couldn’t tell from the image):

Get Yourself a “Little Black Book”

This is my entrepreneurial face.

Now, your little black book does not have to be little, it does not have to be black, heck it doesn’t even have to be a book, all it really needs to be is some organized place where you keep your ideas.  If you’d prefer to use Post Its on your wall or a word document, so be it, I’ve simply chosen to use the height of all pretentious writing tools: a Moleskine notebook.

The trick to using your little black book, just like anything, is persistence.  You must be willing to write in your book without a filter, without judging what you’re writing.  No matter how good, or how bad an idea is, write it down.  Given a little time, and some further thought, you may find that you can refine a bad idea and make it spectacular.  Along the same lines, make sure you write down your nebulous ideas; an idea doesn’t need to be fleshed out for it to be useful.  In fact, I usually leave myself about a page or two for every idea just incase I want to write any further notes, thoughts, or further develop the idea.

As much as I wish it was, creativity is not a constant, so it is important to write ideas down as you have them, or else they may be lost forever.  So, always make sure that you have your little black book handy for when you have a sudden moment of inspiration.  You don’t want to have to beat yourself up later for forgetting “the best idea in the world.”

You’ll note that I never said this was limited to business ideas.  I did that because entrepreneurial thinking is something you can apply to any and all aspects of your life whether it be business, pleasure, finance, writing, experimental physics, or whatever.  Personally, I keep two Moleskine books: one for business and product ideas, and the other for comedy and movie ideas and they both stay within 10 feet of me at all times, because you never know when an idea might hit.

Before I transitioned myself to the little black book model, my room was covered with scraps of paper with half-baked ideas, and somewhere across the room there was probably another bunch of papers refining those ideas.  Over the years, because I lacked any sort of organizational system, many of those ideas were simply lost, either physically, or just contextually.  You’d be amazed how quickly you can forget the meaning behind something you wrote.  Take for instance this, apparent, comedic gem that I found on a scrap of paper: “Smoke Condom.”  That’s it!  That is the extent of my note regarding what I thought was a brilliant idea at the time.  Now, all these years later, I haven’t the foggiest idea what I was talking about.

Persistence plays a role here as well; always follow up on ideas, and clearly define them for yourself, otherwise a few years from now you might find yourself struggling to remember what the hell a smoke condom is and why it would be so hilarious.

Alright, here’s this week’s tip in a nutshell: Write every idea you ever have down.  Creativity comes in bursts so you’d better be ready to transcribe it when it arrives.  And always make sure to follow up, define, and refine your ideas so you don’t forget what the idea was.

With that said…does anyone have any idea what a smoke condom is?  I’d really like to know.

-Nick