Nobody succeeds beyond their wildest dreams unless they START with some pretty wild dreams.

I keep a journal, or a little Moleskine pocket-sized book, or at least a handy notepad with me pretty much at all times. I try to cultivate a habit of whenever I hear a quote that tweaks my thinking….or have an idea that seems interesting … I write it down, with attribution if needed, and with enough “context” to re-frame it in my thinking if I come back to it days or weeks or even months later.

Sometimes I’m really good at doing this, sometimes not so much.

Regardless of how diligent I am at any given moment at recording these things though, I do have ideas come through my mind all the time.  Or maybe just interesting quotes I hear at a conference or seminar.  Or an “aha moment”.    You know what I mean….  “Hey wouldn’t it be great if …..”   or “You know what I wish we had?  I wish there was a ……”   or “Holy Cow! Why had I never thought of THAT before?”.    That sort of thing.

You too?   Sure you do.

I *think* many of us come up with ideas, or encounter interesting possibilities, or come across things that challenge our thinking every single day.  Right?

What if you had the habit of recording them so they didn’t get lost?

That’s what I’m trying to cultivate the habit of doing. I flag some of the things that get recorded with the heading: “IDEA!” I put down some details, a date, and even a thought or two of what a “next step” might be. Then later, after it’s percolated for at least a day or so, or even longer, I like to flip back through and note whether it still seems like a “Great Idea”, or a “Big Idea” or “Interesting Challenge”, or “Not so much”.   Sometimes I write:  “Action Plan???” or  “Now What??”  I look at those “next steps” I jotted down and see if it seems like something that I should spend some more time on myself, or try to get some shared energy around.

I’m convinced that most of us are far more creative and innovative than we give ourselves credit for.  That’s not an original thought.  Others have said this, in many varied ways.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?  …  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

– Maryianne Williamson

“When I am ….. completely myself, entirely alone… or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.”

– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”

– Will Self

Here’s an example.  I’m not sharing this story to make any statement about how great or how smart or visionary I am.  It’s just an illustration of the notion that ideas have value.

I remember very specifically thinking about something back in the early 1980’s when I was working as a young Sales Engineer.  My job was to be out and traveling around Tennessee every single day, calling on industrial plants all around Middle and East TN.  I was in Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, the Tri-Cities, and all the small cities and rural areas in between.  There are very few industrial plants in this part of the state that I have not been in, walking the factory floor and seeing how their systems and processes work…meeting with their manufacturing engineers or their senior management to talk about ways to enhance productivity.   Often I had a lot of “windshield time” between sales calls.   And I also had many, many times when I would try to find some place to stop, grab a coffee or a sandwich, make some notes about the sales call I’d just made or take a moment to prepare for the one I was heading to.

Around then, I was also just getting interested in food and cooking … and in all things “coffee”.  The idea of opening a restaurant sort of appealed to me. But it was a pretty daunting fact that (at that time) the anecdotal evidence said that something like 95% of all non-franchise restaurants that open would fail within the first 3 years.   It’s a hard business to break into with any success.  That, and the fact when you open a business of that sort, you had better be damned-well prepared for it to become your life.  It’s not something you can just do and then “leave it at the office” at the end of the day. Restaurants, if they are to be successful, take a huge commitment of time and energy and passion and, well … belief… on the part of the owner.

So, there were a lot of reasons that I didn’t *actually* pursue the idea of opening a restaurant.  At least, I didn’t pursue it to the point where I had any realistic idea of making it happen.   But let me tell you about my idea and how much I *did* pursue it …

The notion I had of a restaurant was a place that opened very early each day, had a few types of good coffee available, and had some simple breakfast fare like a variety pastries or bagels or breakfast sandwiches. Then at lunch there would always be 4 or 5 different soups available, a few well-chosen deli sandwiches, and a few different types of salads. Then by the time mid- to late-afternoon rolled around, it would basically be done for the day. Not a “dinner” place at all. But here’s the thing….. the restaurant would be specifically marketed to the community to become well-known as a place where you might come in the morning for a breakfast meeting with clients or friends. Maybe a place where a small-group might meet before work for a bible-study over coffee and a sweet roll, or where moms might go to meet up after dropping the kids at school. It would be a casual spot very welcoming to a sales professional such as I was at the time who just wanted a place to sit, grab something to eat and make a phone call or two or do some paperwork.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had basically envisioned the concept for “Panera Bread Company“

There were essentially zero places like that back in 1983/84. But somehow I knew in my gut that there was a “need” for one…. or at least there was an opportunity to create such a place and see if one could make it a success.  I even made a few notes about what a menu might look like, and tried to investigate how much the commercial kitchen equipment and fixtures might cost. Because I can tend to be something of an obsessive nerd about stuff like this, and because I had a drafting table in our apartment, I even sketched up a floor-plan of the “front of house” part of the restaurant, with counter, “coffee bar”, booths and tables.   I even remember stopping at a couple of commercial restaurant supply houses and looking at ovens, flat-tops, and other equipment and cooking gear.  I tried to estimate how many dollars per day of food I would have to sell to break even or turn a profit.   I stopped short of creating a formal “business plan”.  But I did talk about the idea just a bit to my father-in-law.  I was interested in his take on this idea.  As a business man, and somebody who was very-well plugged in with the “restaurant scene” in Nashville at the time, how did he think such a place might succeed?  (For the record, he liked the idea.)  But “fear”, lack of “gumption”, and all the barriers to entry into such a venture kept me from giving it more than a little conceptual spin through my head and a couple of weeks of my attention.

The rest, as they say, is history. I’m still an engineer, and there are any number of places you could point to out there in the “real world” that at least “sort of” fit that model I was envisioning.

Now, I’m certainly not claiming to be any kind of a visionary. What I’m saying is just this:  Your ideas have value.   Not just potential monetary value, though certainly that *might* be true.   But well beyond that, your ideas have value in and of themselves.  Every time you think “Hey, we should be doing ……”   there is a kernel of *something* in that thought.  You may have hit on something that can change lives.  You may have hit on something that at the very least can change the trajectory of YOUR life, or the life of your family.

Right now, I am VERY excited that one of those ideas I had a while back has re-surfaced.  And by sharing it with others, in the right context, it’s starting to get some traction.    Something that I envisioned with literally an initial thought of:  “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if….”, is starting to look like it will actually come to fruition.  Nobody will get rich from this idea.  But I do believe a significant number of lives here in Middle TN and maybe even well beyond *may* be changed.   There’s still a lot of work to do to bring the idea to fruition.

But I’m in.   I’m WHOLEHEARTEDLY in.

And I have high, high hopes that the reality will be every bit as big and as cool and as important and as potentially life-changing as it was in my head when I envisioned it.

I believe it will be as awesomely amazing as it was when I originally jotted it down.   In that journal right up there at the top of this post.

Stay tuned.

Love,

John