You forget a lot more than you remember.

In my experience, nothing is reliably more interesting or useful to you than ideas you’ve previously found interesting or useful, but have since forgotten. I’m enormously grateful to have access to an Evernote library of over 3200 notes stretching back to February of 2014, exclusively filled with things that I personally have considered interesting or useful enough to bother capturing.

Not all of it is genius, and some of it I would have remembered whether I kept it in Evernote or not, but I know for a fact that there are some ideas in there that have gone on to change my life, but not immediately. They’ve had their full impact only when I’ve gone back and found them again later.

Find somewhere to keep your ideas.

I don’t think it matters what you do for a living, for a hobby, or for relaxing, your brain simply wasn’t designed to remember everything it thinks of. That’s pretty much the central thesis of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and the inspiration for the work of Tiago Forte, the founder of Building A Second Brain (and one of few people I really love following on Twitter).

Whether you want to go all-in and try building a second brain, or just start capturing good ideas somewhere, I think adopting a habit of recording your ideas and the sources that inspire them is of enormous value; professionally, socially, intellectually, spiritually, and… yeah, pretty much all the -ally’s.