Scott Ginsberg is fast becoming one of my new favorite bloggers. Yesterday I started reading his book Make A Name For Yourself and loved one of his quotes that stated “If you’re not holding a pen right now, go get one. Inspiration comes unannounced.” Now today I am reading a post that Scott wrote a few days ago titled “38 Random Thoughts About Creativity” in which he says, “… Thomas Edison carried a 200-page notebook wherever he went, just for his ideas. At the end of his life, he’d filled up more than 3,400 of them. He also obtained more patents than any person in history. What does THAT tell you?”
Well, it tells me a lot! Granted, Edison was an inventor and not a copywriter but I don’t really think that matters one iota when it comes to inspiration and creativity. I’m just wondering what kind of system he used to keep his thoughts all organized. I, too, have years worth of thoughts written down (on every kind of paper imaginable — hotel notepads, napkins, grocery store receipts, and of course stenopads, spirals notebooks and legal pads!) and I am now in the process of trying to sort through all this “brilliance” and get it into subject-labeled folders.
This is no small task. I’ve been working on this little project an hour at a time for days now. Sadly, I have nothing much to show for all my hard work except piles of folders stuffed full of paper which are now sitting where the piles of paper used to be. I confess I’ve been entertaining rather tempting thoughts about calling it quits and ruthlessly tossing every bit of it, but this quote about Thomas Edison has, at least temporarily, spared my trash collectors a backache that surely would have followed the pickup at my curb this morning.
I am certainly inspired by Edison’s perseverence and dutiful recording of this ideas and thoughts. I wonder whether he was organized and had some sort of system to keep track of it all. I’m trying, but memories of an old saying I embroidered and hung in my bedroom as a teenager keeps coming to mind — “Creative minds are seldom tidy.”
Does that give me permission to ditch the office organization project this afternoon and go enjoy the sunshine? I think — YES!
Until next time …
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