Put your ideas to paper
Know the feeling when you have no idea what you want to do and no idea why you’re doing the things you’re doing? That was me in 2005, sitting in the back of a 300-person lecture hall, bored out of my mind, trying to figure out why I was in college.
While browsing Facebook, an ad caught my eye and I clicked on it. It’s the only ad I’ve ever willingly clicked. It led to a nondescript site asking me to fill out a three-question form: Do you like to take photos? Do you have a camera phone? Do you know lots of people?
Yes, yes, and sure.
When you’re frustrated, it’s easy to be curious.
The ad ended up being for a startup in San Francisco that was recruiting college kids to help spread their product. I met the founders in Chicago a few weeks later. They were traveling to a handful of colleges doing early product research. After spending a few hours with them, I was enamored.
A few months later they flew me out to their offices in San Francisco. On my way back to Chicago I picked up a postcard and hand-wrote them a thank you note.
Hungry for more, I begged for an internship. And they gave it to me.
I spent the next summer working from their office, driving their awesome fur-lined promotion van to events up and down the California coast, and learning everything I could. My eyes were opened to the world of startups.
The rest of college left me longing for more experiences like that one. When I bought new notebooks, I would draw a line down the center of each page. The left side was for lecture notes and the right side was for website and business ideas. Every time I’d study for a final, I’d review my notes and notice that the ideas always far outnumbered the class notes.
Putting ideas down on paper is the first step toward creating something – once you can articulate ideas to yourself, you can articulate them to someone else too.
Committing to your ideas can be scary. It’s one thing to write them in a notebook; it’s another to make them into reality. You run the risk of rejection in sharing your ideas honestly, but it far outweighs the alternative: not trying at all.
To this day I still draw a line down the center of my notebooks. The difference? I get to put ideas on both sides.
David Hoffman is obsessed with music, technology, and data. He cofounded and leads product/design work at Next Big Sound, a startup based in beautiful Boulder, CO that provides analytics to the music industry. Before Next Big Sound, he studied Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University.
