don’t have a pen or a recorder with you, so you fixate on the idea,
repeating it to yourself, trying not to lose it. You become a zombie,
walking through the mall staring into space and mumbling to
yourself. If you have a cell phone, you can call your own phone
number and leave the idea as a message. Not a bad option as an
emergency measure, but not good as a regular routine. It takes too
long, and there is always the chance that someone will pick up the
phone or pick up the message. What’s the lesson? When your brain
is fixed on one idea, it’s not open and receptive to other good ideas.
If you’re really like me, this is a little embarrassing. You jam up
your brain for the entire shopping trip, then halfway home from
the mall, some jerk cuts you off in traffic, which provokes you to
invoke sacred personages at top volume, overloading the RAM
memory in your brain and forcing the really good idea out your
left ear. The upshot? You arrive home with no recollection that
you ever had a really good idea. (There’s a story of the time when
Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher, was practicing his powers of
concentration. He assigned himself the task of focusing only on his
breathing as he walked in the city. A few minutes into his walk, he
noticed a new tobacco shop and stopped in to see the selection.
Two days later he remembered that he had been doing a concen-
tration exercise!)
The all-important point here is that ideas are like Kodak mo-
ments—they only come once in a lifetime. You must capture them
or they are gone. So carry a recorder with you at all times and
sleep with one beside your bed. Okay, enough said.
The next basic tool is a four-color pen. Cost: about $1.99. Buy
them at any drugstore or office supply store. I give them out to
participants in my creativity workshops. Why a four-color pen?
Because it’s hard to find 10-color pens! If they were readily avail-
able I would recommend 10 colors. Seriously though, do you re-
member those yellow-and-green boxes of Crayola crayons you had
as a kid? With 64 colors and a sharpener in the back? The black
crayon always wore down first, so you’d be peeling the paper andGetting Personal 21514-25 ware 215 1/19/01, 1:16 PM