If you keep notes like this and refine your thinking over weeks and months, you’ll develop a catalogue of great ideas that can be put into use at any point in the future.
A good idea gets better over time. A bad idea gets worse over time. So give yourself time as a communicator or writer.
When you jot down your ideas and revisit them as time passes, you’ll have a much clearer sense of which is which, and the pressure to get to Sunday disappears. Plus you can keep refining them and making them better.
2. Spend a lot of time on a few key words or thoughts.
When you’re keeping your journal of ideas and concepts for the future, keep them simple.
My notes look like a series of key phrases and ideas that I keep refining until they resonate.
If your thinking is strong (see #1 above), then the next most important thing is to phrase your thinking so it’s both memorable and impactful.
Many communicators I know and respect summarize their thinking in a bottom line: a short, memorable statement that outlines the main point of the message you’re delivering.
Here are some examples of bottom lines I’ve written recently:
Changing your mind can change your life. (For a message on Romans 12 on renewing your mind.)
Moral compromise compromises you. (For a future message on relative morality.)
You can make excuses or you can make progress, but you can’t make both. (Originally for a blog post but also for a message and for a future book.)
God is bigger than your circumstances, and he’s better than your than your circumstances. (For a message on how to pray through tough circumstances.)
It can take me weeks or months of letting an idea simmer to reduce to a simple statement like the statements above, but it’s so worth it.
I find that once I have a key idea stated as simply as that, the message becomes relatively easy to write, because the statement has so much pre-loaded into it.
If you want more, I outline in detail how to write killer bottom lines here.
Why is this so important? It’s simple. If you’re not clear on what your message is about, no one else will be either.
If you can’t state the main point of your message in a simple phrase, then you don’t understand it well enough to deliver it.
3. Test your key ideas on a team.
I personally do a lot of my writing alone, but I employ a team at key stages.
Some of my favorite writing moments happen when I walk a rough draft of the bottom lines and a short summary of the talk or series I’m working on into a meeting and bounce them off my team.
Three things happens when I present my outline to a team:
1. I learn which ideas resonate and which don’t. Better to find this out now than when giving the talk.
2. The team will frequently offer better ways to phrase key ideas than I’ve developed on my own. This makes the message or talk far better.
3. Verbally processing my ideas in front of a team often helps me discover better ways to say things than I would have discovered on my own.
I like to walk ideas into a meeting like this a month or two before I need to finish the message.
This works when you’re writing a piece too. Bouncing it off other people will almost always make your thinking and phrasing better.
