Stephen King says the ideas worth pursuing are the ones that stick with you over time, like Under the Dome, which he conceived in 1973 and remembered years later. He keeps a notebook for all ideas, good and bad, because the good ones naturally survive. The question: do you write everything down, or trust the big ideas to return on their own?
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is: The good ideas stay with you. Over to you, Stephen King. I wake up every morning with espresso to keep me going.
People will say, do you keep a notebook? And the answer is, I think a writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around. It's like, to me, it's like if you were to put breadcrumbs in a strainer and shake it, which is what the passage of time is for me. It's like shaking a strainer. All this stuff that's not very big and not very important just kind of dissolves and falls out. But the good stuff stays. You know, the big pieces stay. I had the idea for Under the Dome when I was teaching high school back in 1973, and it was just too big for me, and I was too young for it. And I wrote about 25, 26 pages and put it away. There's a scene at the beginning of this book where this woodchuck gets cut in half when this dome comes down over this town. I had written that part when I was in in my early 20s and just sort of recreated it from memory when I, when I wrote the book. So the good stuff stays.
So I'm the kind of person who likes to write things down. I'm the kind of person who has— when I have an idea, whether it's 2 in the morning or, you know, 3 at night or whatever it is, when I have an idea, I want to write it down. I feel like unless I can get it out of my head— and now I tend to just send myself an email or write it in Evernote— until I get it out of my head, I'm unsettled. I feel like I'm gonna forget the idea. And it's something that I've wrestled with, this message of, you know, maybe I'm just not gonna write anything down and the best ideas that I have will just continue to come back and come back and come back, and those are the ones that I should run with. And if I look at how many times I actually look over that Evernote file, it's pretty slim. And I feel like I kind of do it anyway, where the best ideas come back to me over and over again, and that's what I run with. But I haven't fully embraced it. Maybe it's out of fear of losing a great idea, and every now and then when I look through the notes, something does come back and I end up running with it, and I fear that I may have forgot it if I didn't write it down, and I could have missed a big chunk of a big project I'm working on. But maybe that's an irrational fear. I don't know. This is something that I want to play with more. I do know that when I was thinking about my one word of "believe" that's been the foundation for this channel and a lot of the work that I do. When I first thought about it, I felt like it was too big. I felt like it wasn't the right one for me. I felt like, I felt like it was hard to live up to. And the more I slept on it, the more time went on, the more, you know, I experimented with it, the more it felt right. And every passing day, that big idea just stuck with me more and more and more until I embraced it fully and it became the basis of this channel and my website and all the work that I do. So I think there's something there. I feel like I don't do a good enough job on it, and I wonder if it might be worth an experiment for a week to not write anything down and just trust that the big ideas will stay there. That's an interesting one. I'm gonna think on that. I'm not gonna write it down. I'm gonna think on that. You know what? I'll see if it sticks. See if I stick— so it kind of come back I get back from Orlando, if that idea is still in my head, then I'll do it. I like it. So the question of the day today is, do you write everything down, or do you trust that the big ideas will just stick? Leave it in the comments below. I'm gonna join in the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.
