Evotional.com - Mark Batterson

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, but I think one difference between successful and unsuccesful people is what they do with their ideas. Successful people have a mechanism for capturing their ideas and then acting on them. Unsuccessful people forget about them. I read this week about how Jeff Taylor got the idea for Monster.com. It was 4:30 AM. He was an ad agency owner at the time. He woke up and wrote down a flurry of graphics and text on the pad of paper next to his bed. Then he got up and went to a coffeeshop and spent the next five hours jotting down his business plan for the job search engine. Taylor has a poster in his closet that says: "Eighty percent of life is showing up." That sums it up pretty good. He said, "It would have been pretty easy to have rolled over and gone back to sleep, and that would have been a multibillion-dollar opportunity I would have let go by." How many of us have gone to sleep and lost billion dollar ideas? That's how ideas die. I just a huge believer in Habakkuk 2: "Write down the vision." It can be a sketch pad or napkin or journal. Just this week I was going through my "stuff" because we're moving offices. I found a napkin from Uno's pizzeria with some pretty amazing ideas I'd written down years ago. I kept it. There is a little food stain on there, but it reminded me again of how important it is to "take captive every thought." This is especially important for those of us who are Spirit-led. I know of an NCCer that has a prayer journal that has really inspired me. She can look back on that journal and remember exactly what she's believing God for. It's about documenting our lives and documenting God's faithfulness.