The compounding effect of small ideas

One small idea isn’t worth much. A hundred small ideas, written down and stacked on top of each other, are worth quite a lot. The trick is the stacking.

Most people throw their small ideas away. They don’t seem big enough to keep. So the work never compounds. Each new idea has to start from scratch, and starting from scratch is expensive.

The writers who keep notebooks aren’t smarter. They’ve just decided in advance that even the small ideas are worth catching. And after a year of that, they have a bookshelf instead of a memory.

Compounding works the same way for ideas as it does for money. The first decade is boring. The second decade is the whole point.

If you’re impatient, ideas are a bad investment. If you can wait, almost nothing pays better.