 Do you believe an idea from a few hundred years ago could help us all be more creative today? Stick around. I'll tell you why and how. Welcome back everyone and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. One of the things we're always trying to do as leaders is foster creativity and innovation in ourselves and in our team because let's face it, some of the ways we've tried to solve problems in the past just aren't going to solve our problems anymore and we're looking for some really creative and innovative solutions to put a nail in the coffin of those problems and get them taken care of. One of the ways I've found is really effective towards fostering your own creativity and your own innovation comes from our book club selection for the month of August, Stephen Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From. And in the book, Stephen dispels the myth that great ideas and great innovations are epiphanies or lightning strikes in our brain that come all at once at the moment they're exactly needed. He talks about this idea of a slow hunch. And a slow hunch is the idea that our brains are always gathering information. They're always having little ideas. They're always putting things together in new and interesting ways and just associating things together. And what happens over a long period of time is all those little associations build up into a big idea or a big solution to a problem. Also in the book, he talks about the great thinkers of the Enlightenment period used something called a commonplace book to gather their ideas and this was back before books were bound. This is the time period of Milton and Locke and Bacon and the great thinkers of their day and books weren't bound. They were just these loose folios of paper and they would take these ideas and they'd write them on a sheet of paper and they'd put it in their book, this commonplace book and they would put it aside and they'd pick it back up later and review it when they were thinking about the problems they were trying to solve. And one of these really specific examples that he gives is Charles Darwin who is kind of at the end of this time period and he looks back at Darwin's theory of natural selection and the way Darwin talked about his theory of natural selection, he talks about how it all kind of came to him at the end right before he published it. And when you go back and you look at Darwin's journals and notes over a period of decades, you can see the little ideas and the little pieces of information he was gathering and putting together and you can follow this progression of ideas throughout the years to what ultimately became Darwin's theory of natural selection. So I find the term commonplace book to be a little bit awkward to use here in the 21st century so I call my book My Leader's Journal and if you've got the idea this is a really organized slick book that is cross-indexed, I can go find anything I'm looking for right away, that's not the case. My book's kind of a mess but it's okay and I'm gonna tell you why in a little bit but it does work for me. So what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna tell you about a couple tools that I use that you can start using to put together your leader's journal. So the first tool I've got in My Leader's Journal is exactly what you would expect. It is a handwritten journal. Blank pages, lines on the sleeve, you can write on it and that's where I do my daily practice every day. I write down my intentions, I write down what I'm grateful for and at the end of the day I go back and I review all of those things to see how I did and how that's gonna affect me tomorrow. One of the great things about the book I use is it's designed for the next tool I'll tell you about Evernote and I can take pictures of what I write down in my journal and scan those into Evernote and it'll digitally index those and make those searchable. And I mentioned my next tool is Evernote. So Evernote can capture digital content in a lot of different ways and tag it and sort it and it's a really really powerful tool. What I like to do with Evernote is I like to use screenshots and capturing web pages and I like the visual aspect that comes along with that because when I just see the visual I'm instantly reminded of what I was going to do with that. And I use Evernote a lot for the things that I want to follow up on later especially if I've been talking to someone online or I find something online. Another tool I use are article readers like Feedly and Flipboard and I actually use both of those and I use those to subscribe to articles and blogs from thought leaders that I really like and respect. And those two tools come with a couple of features that are really helpful. The first one is let's just save stuff for later so you can go back and find it again. The other thing that Feedly and Flipboard let you do is they make it really easy to share to social media. And it's important to share to social media because what you want to do is when you find an interesting article you want to capture your thoughts along with that. And I find that the easiest way to get myself to share my thoughts about an article is to take the article, post it to social media and tell the world why I thought this article was important and what I think that people can get out of it. The added benefit of that is that you can go and get other people's comments on your comments and on the article and that can help generate more ideas and get to this idea of what this leaders journal, this commonplace book is all about to foster creativity in yourself and others. So those are some of the tools I use in my leaders journal and the important thing is you got to find the tools that are going to work for you. As I mentioned earlier it's not that important if your book isn't really well organized. And the reason for that is you're not going to go back and look up facts in this book. What you're going to do is you're going to go back and periodically review this book and look at all the little pieces of information you've gathered and you're going to take those little ideas that you're writing down or putting into your journal somehow and you're going to see if that sparks other ideas. What the purpose here is, what we're trying to do is we're trying to use how your brain works. We're trying to harness that creativity in your brain to help you come up with creative and innovative solutions to your problems. Once you've got some tools figured out for building your leaders journal, tell us about them in the comments because we're always looking for ways to spark our own creativity. Come back later in the week, we're going to have a blog post that talks about some different kinds of content you can put in and how you can put those together into your leaders journal to help spark your own creativity and innovation. And the best way to get our content is click on that globe to the right. That'll get you subscribed to our email list and that will bring all of our content directly to your inbox. Thanks so much for watching and remember the future is out there. Leave the way.