I’ve realized recently that even if I have grandiose ideas that could change everything, within a week or two I’ve almost completely forgotten about them.
At the time I came up with them, of course, I thought that I would never need any kind of reminder. Self-assured of my own profundity, I assume that they are so important that they will be top-of-mind forevermore.
But, that’s not how things play out.
In this blog, specifically, I’ve had ideas and written already about things that I think have the potential to seriously impact my success. And yet, most of them lie dormant; not only not acted-upon, but not even remembered.
Fortunately, I think it’s just a major human weaknesses that we get all excited about things (perhaps rightfully so) and then naturally get distracted by other things or bogged down by the trivial. Unfortunately, it is a serious weakness, and without some kind of mechanism to counteract it, has the potential to completely derail ideas that would otherwise prove extremely valuable.
Now, for the most part, I don’t think I need to go to lengths such as adding calendar reminders about every post and idea that I have. I tend to ignore those anyway.
I’m thinking that I need to regularly read my old posts. And if they hold up to the test of time and hindsight, perhaps create something more permanent. Implement them into my processes.
For now, I think what I’ll do is institute a rule where I either read one of my articles per day, or two every time I actually write one. Over time I can determine whether this is adequate.
Hopefully it will be enough to stay on top of everything and nurture the good ideas and implement them in my life. If there are ones that turn out not to be very relevant or useful, maybe I’ll create a new category to exclude them.
Either way, I think it’s critical to use this kind of self-reflection as more than just an outlet to dump ideas where they will fade away, just so I can clear my head. It needs to actually be useful!
Two years later I still agree strongly with this. Reviewing these has been extremely helpful. Eventually I think I’ll start highlighting the best-of-the-best and reviewing those more regularly.
This post is within about a month of the very first post, I’m not sure I understand how it could have already been such a problem that I was forgetting about earlier posts…
Within the last week I finally implemented a way to highlight the “best of” posts. I have a new category called “Classic Posts” and going forward, I will probably mostly only review those posts.
I’m just shy of 300 posts now so it sort of takes a long time to get through them all otherwise.