Substack is the place to be right now.
Everyone’s here. People are showing up and putting things out into the world.
There’s this moment at the beginning where it feels easy. Ideas everywhere. Things we’ve been meaning to say. And then, around post four, it gets quiet. Not because the ideas are gone, but because when it’s time to write, we can’t access any of them.
This isn’t just writing. It's what happens when our thoughts have nowhere to live.
I’d have great ideas while walking, coaching, or booster shot’ing and Id think, “Oh, that’s something I want to write about,” fully confident I’d remember it later.
My brain moved quickly, my life moved faster, and anything not written down evaporated pretty damn rapidly.
Eventually I had to admit the problem wasn’t a lack of ideas. I had plenty.
I just wasn’t catching them.
There was a moment last year when this all clicked.
I was scrolling endlessly through screenshots looking for a single quote I knew I’d saved. I kept scrolling. And scrolling. And at some point it hit me: I didn’t have one reliable place for the things that matter to me.
None of it together. Just…fragments everywhere.
It was a clarity issue. A thinking issue. A where did that thought go? issue.
That’s when someone mentioned a commonplace book: a simple way to capture ideas. I looked it up, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: somewhere to put things you don’t want to forget.
I grabbed a cheap notebook (shout out to HEB, my fellow Texans know…) and started dropping things into it: quotes, observations, coaching insights, lines from conversations, metaphors, anything that made me think Ohhhhh. Not curated, just consistent enough that everything lived in one place.
My writing became easier almost immediately.
I stopped sitting down to a blank screen hoping inspiration would strike. Instead, I looked at what I’d already captured and chose what I was curious about that day. It stopped being about coming up with something new and became about returning to what was already there.
Over time, something else started happening: my ideas began connecting to each other.
A note from July connected with a podcast I listened to last week. A line I grabbed months ago lined up with a client conversation I had yesterday. I wasn’t engineering any of it. The patterns just showed up.
That’s the compounding effect: when ideas live in one place, they strengthen each other.
It’s the same principle I talk about in money, habits, parenting and everything else: small things, kept consistent, get more valuable over time.
My version of a commonplace book is simple:
I save one thing a day (an idea, a note, something someone said that sticks) and on Sundays, I take a few minutes, skim through the week, and notice what keeps resurfacing.
What surprised me the most is how much I had already figured out and just couldn’t tap back into.
I kept thinking I needed new ideas when what I really needed was a way back to the things I’d already captured.
Most of us aren’t starting from zero nearly as often as we think we are.
We just keep abandoning things before they have a chance to compound.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.