[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi everyone. Katherine here with Jack and Darrell, and today we're going to talk to you about capturing ideas. Let's start with you, Darrell. You've told me once a great story about capturing ideas for your dissertation, can you tell us again? >> Sure. When I was in graduate school we learned certain skills about keeping lab notebooks, and things like that. >> Uh-huh. >> Our observations and what we did in the experiments and so on. But there was one night that I had a lot of ideas and I was able to capture them. I was a sound sleeper. I still am a sound sleeper. So I went to bed, I woke up in the middle of the night and I had this idea. >> Okay. >> For my thesis and I had the presence of mind to actually get out of bed and to write it down on a sheet of paper. Went back to bed, fell back to sleep later on that night, I woke up. Another idea. And, you know ideas on how are you going to use electro magnetic flows to measure inter particle forces between colloidal particles right. >> Sure. >> Important ideas so I feel back asleep and I kept doing this all night. Waking up and I had ideas that I kept writing down, and when I woke up in the morning, I went over to my desk. There it was. The plan for my entire PhD thesis was sitting in front of me. Enough work for three or four years and, and there were a lot of experiments and a lot of hurdles between there and the finish line. >> Mm-hm. >> But all the ideas were sitting on the page that night. And that thesis, eventually won a, an award, and helped me get the job at Penn State, on a, on the faculty of Penn State. So at that time, I was just writing them down on pieces of paper, nowadays, I use an audio recorder. >> Oh, okay. >> Just simple little audio recorder, 50 bucks, and I take voice notes throughout the day, at the end of the day I just download them into my computer and, and keep track of them that way for, you know, it only takes like five minutes. But, that's how I got started into using the Idea Journal, idea that Jack talks about in his book. >> Yeah. So, Jack, Idea Journals. Well, first of all, what, why is it important that Darrell captures the ideas that. We all capture ideas. Why is it so important that we do that? >> Well, Da, Darrell did something that everybody needs to do. And that is he, had lots of ideas, he wrote these wrote those ideas down. That created more ideas, more ideas, more progress, better result. Ultimately, success. >> Mm-hm. >> It all starts with writing down initially those ideas. >> Core ideas. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Now how do you record your ideas? Do you use a recorder too? >> No, I do it the old fashioned way. >> Okay. >> I have an idea journal. >> Okay. >> And, on scraps of paper during the day, if I don't have my jour-, idea journal, I write it down and then I put it in my idea journal. And, there it is. >> And you have many of these journals. >> Well, I have journals going back 30 years, a stack this tall. >> Mm-hm. >> And that's my raw material. >> Yeah. >> That's my raw material for crea, creating myself, changing myself creating a new life. >> You hav, you have your expert witnessing face on Jack you look like your expert witnessing face have you ever used an idea journal in an expert witnessing case? >> Yes I do expert witnessing for instance I was involved in Erin Brokovitch case about a decade ago. And there I had my idea journal, and asking questions to everybody. And those questions, would degrade into ideas in my journal. >> Mm-hm. >> And as those ideas accumulated and accumulated, ultimately, those ideas became my testimony. >> Mm-hm. So it kind became a coherent result at the end. You distilled down those ideas. That you wrote down in the idea journal and even, eventually came up with a distilled testimony. >> Yes my story. >> So idea, capturing ideas whether it's an idea journal or a voice recorder, they keep you from forgetting things, right? They help you builds habits of observation, and they give you information tools resources that you can use as you move forward. I don't know about you, but I think I'm going to get this down in my journal right away. We'll see you next time. Do you have a pen? [LAUGH]
