Write It Down, Make It Happen: Knowing What You Want--and Getting It! - Hardcover

Once you start writing your goals down, the brain will send you all kinds of new material: innovative, energizing ideas for planning out and expanding those ambitions. That is the good news. Now for the bad: You will forget the best of the plans and ideas if you don't come up with a system for recording and reviewing them.

Flash floods of insights come -- and go -- quickly.

"The horror of that moment I shall never, never forget," says the king in Alice in Wonderland. The queen's quick retort: "You will though, if you don't make a memorandum of it."

I recommend that you purchase and carry with you a small memo pad to gather your ideas immediately as they come to you. In many large companies, wall boxes inviting comments foster creative contributions by employees. Similarly, this tiny notebook in your pocket will become a kind of suggestion box for your brain, inviting ideas by the fact that you carry it on your person.

One example of a small memo book that helps get the job done is a wheel book.

"You can't build a house without a wheel book," is the expression my close friend Nancy used when she was constructing a residence in Texas from the ground up.

"Wheel book" is a nautical term. Nancy's husband Eric is a retired navy captain; at one point they lived aboard a forty-one-foot sailing ship. The navy uses a large thread-bound green memo book to chart the activity at the helm (in the wheelhouse), and smaller versions to track jobs to be done around the ship. Every conscientious individual on the ship carries one, from captain to chief to seaman. A wheel book assures accurate accounting.

The first contractor Nancy was working with in Texas constantly promised things on which he did not follow through, frustrating Nancy immensely -- until she hit upon the solution: he needed a wheel book to write things down.

When Nancy gave the contractor a wheel book, his performance improved immediately. Since then, the motto "You can't build a house without a wheel book" has become for me a catch phrase to embody the necessity of capturing on paper the strategies surrounding any big task I am working on. Whenever I have a goal in motion, a dream under construction, I carry a wheel book devoted exclusively to that project. In fact, I often emblazon Nancy's credo across the front of a small book as I christen it for a new adventure. "You can't build a house without a wheel book" applies to constructing more than new residences.

Although a wheel book keeps track, in one convenient place, of the people to call and jobs to get done, it is infinitely more than that.

Having a place to record your musings, and keeping it and a pen nearby, sends a signal to the brain, "I am ready for your input."

Carrying a little book with you honors the ideas that come to you, and when you do that, the part of your brain that comes up with these suggestions will be so thrilled to get a little attention and respect that it will send you even more. You will become a hotbed of lively suggestions sparking your imagination continually.

Tidbit Journals

A tidbit journal is another kind of collection box for ideas. In Put Your Heart on Paper, I describe how Sara Rashad used a tidbit journal while traveling, as a place to jot down images and phrases she saw and heard during the day. Later, at night, she would transfer those tidbits to her larger format journal, expanding the narrative. Sara said that carrying this little book with her was not just for remembering details, but made her pay attention in a sharper way to what was happening all around her. She said it put her "in tune with every moment."

When I gave a two-week workshop in Skyros, Greece, to an international audience, I brought with me from the States tiny books, replicas of old-time school composition books with marbleized covers. Across the front of each little book I wrote each student's name and the word "tidbits."

I told them to take the book wherever they went and jot down concepts as they came to their mind, perhaps images they might want to write up more thoroughly later, or plans to put in motion once they returned to their own countries.

By the second day, they told me warmly that having a place to record their impressions was keeping all their senses alert. It was helping them notice more, be more aware. It was encouraging them to think.

I still chuckle when I remember how I'd see my students everywhere on the island, making "tidbit" entries -- on the beach, at the taverna, at the folk museum. One night we all went dancing at a nightclub on the edge of the Aegean called Skyropoula. There was Briano, a member of the class, in the midst of all the merriment, sitting in a corner with a glass of retsina, as eager as a cub reporter, capturing his fleeting thoughts on paper. What a happy look he had on his face.

By the end of our two-week session together, they knew this wasn't just something to do for a summer course, but for the rest of their lives. They were astonished at how carrying those little books in their pockets had changed their entire experience of being in Greece.

"I found myself," said Nonnie from Surrey, with delight, "as living twice as much as I did before, because I was paying attention more."

That's because carrying a tidbit journal makes you keener to the workings of the RAS (reticular activating system) we talked about in chapter 1. Having a wheel book or a tidbit book ready at hand stimulates your thalamus to alert the cortex: Wake up. Open your eyes. Look and see. Be present to the signs all around you. Life is on your side.

And keeping track of these signs by noting them makes them mount up.

Changing the Conversation

The "suggestion box for the brain" does not have to be a spiral or a sewn, bound book. It is just as effective -- for some, more so -- when the "ahas" you experience are captured and corralled on loose index cards.

During a recent business trip to Manhattan, I had the opportunity to visit with John Sexton, the energetic and charismatic dean of New York University Law School, and my former high school debate coach.

I had read an article about John Sexton in The New York Times Magazine that mentioned his peripatetic habit of noting on the go, and was curious to learn more about it. He was happy to tell me about the "Sextonian suggestion box," which is both portable and potent.

The dean carries a stack of unlined, white, jumbo index cards in his breast pocket. He pulls out one card at a time to make a note as something occurs to him, recording only one comment per card, with the card held vertically.

Once he has written something down in black ink on the white card, he is free to move on to other considerations. It is, as he himself likes to say, "a done deal."

He writes on the cards anything that he doesn't want to forget, either personal or professional.

"If I am not thinking about family, I am thinking about school; something will come into my memory bank. Or maybe I'm trolling to see if there is anything that I ought to be doing, or I ought to have done, at home, or to set something up at school."

Before it escapes him, he jots it down.

The dean says he gets his ideas while walking through Washington Square Park, or when he's in a car going to an appointment. Sometimes an idea hits him in the middle of the night, or while shaving.

"It might be a thought about a major new direction for the school; something unusual, an inspiration."

Wherever he is, a card is nearby. He grabs one and writes down the elusive thought.

"Or perhaps, an idea is developing, and in conversation I'll get a 'cut' on it I hadn't thought of before. Sometimes those ideas survive discussions with a colleague, and sometimes they don't, so what I will do then is write the idea on a card to make sure it survives."

Sexton throws out the cards that have to do with appointments, or "if it's just an information thing"; others he gives to the appropriate faculty member or keeps on file until the job is done.

For John Sexton, however, his system of index cards is dramatically more important than a running "to-do" list, easily dispersed and delegated.

They are integral to his whole style of leadership. The dean has profound philosophical reflections on the part they play in his vision of community leadership at a great university and the whole notion of a leader. He calls it his "aspirational mode."

"We have always understood culturally at some level the power of the word and the role of a leader to see things better than they are. Making it concrete actuates it. If you articulate something that is within the community's reach but not yet actuated, the articulation of the goal can move the community toward that actuation. And the same is true of yourself. If you articulate a need, an opportunity, or a concept, you'll start your mind going through the various stages.

"It's not a question of getting the opportunities," he says with emphasis, "it's a question of noticing that opportunities are there."

Leadership depends on spelling out for others the opportunities that are there, and on asking the questions. The job of the leader, he says, is to force the community to ask the right questions.

"You are never going to get answers or creativity if you don't ask the questions."

Sexton is emphatic about this.

"I would put it this way: another way of looking at the cards is that they create an agenda of questions that I am asking. I am not going to get answers unless I am asking the questions, and unless I am putting myself under the burden constantly to want to know why, or how.

"The cards force me to constantly be in a different kind of conversation with the community of people here."

That conversation is action-oriented, leading him continually to ask the questions that challenge, that push toward the possible.

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