Time to start keeping a notebook
As you go through this course, some sections will have exercises for you to do whereas others will just give you lots of new insight and ideas that you might not have thought about before. Now is the time for you to start keeping a notebook of ideas. Ideas and thoughts will come to you as you work through each topic and you need to make a note of them. When you read a case study you should be thinking about how you can apply that to your company and write it down. Don’t worry about putting these ideas in any order, we’ll do that much later, but it is really important that you record them as and when they come to you.
Keep a notebook with you at all times, not just when working though this course. Some people prefer the good old fashioned pen and paper, so if that’s your thing then always have it with you and make it a part of your daily routine. But your notebook doesn’t have to be a physical paper one; online digital notebooks can be very useful, especially due to their search and backup features. I keep my notebook in Evernote which is a digital online cloud-based app, so I can access it whenever or wherever I am: on my desktop, on my tablet or my smartphone. Write your ideas down as soon as you have them. Lisa is used to finding wet footprints on the hallway floor in the morning when I’ve jumped out of the shower to write down a great idea that’s just come to me. Keeping a notebook in the ‘cloud’ means you can record your ideas whilst out on a walk or just before you drop off to sleep.
You can also record and keep audio notes using your smartphone. If an idea hits you when you’re on the treadmill at the gym then use a dictaphone app to record your idea and transcribe it into your notebook later. An alternative is to use WhatsApp to send a voice recording to your significant other then you have it saved on your phone for later.
Over time your notebook will become one of your most valuable business assets. I still pull out old notebooks and flick through them and find ideas that I’d completely forgotten about but have become entirely relevant to where my business is now. Lisa and I also use our notebooks for planning our personal goals and mapping out what we want to achieve because there is nothing more motivating than going back to your plan of twelve months ago and realising you have achieved 70% of everything you wrote down. Seeing things that were only dreams a year ago now being part of your real daily life is incredibly motivating.
In whatever way you are going to keep your notes, I want you to write, sketch and record your ideas as you work through the course. It’s really important that you do this because it means that by the time we get to pulling everything together as a plan, you will already have a solid notebook full of really good ideas and thoughts to start with.
