I Don’t Remember My Best Ideas
By someone who has learned to take notes on himself
There are people in this world who can recall every detail of a conversation days later. I am not one of them. In fact, if you and I are talking and I say something brilliant — something that makes you stop, blink twice, and say “wait, say that again” — you have roughly thirty seconds before it evaporates forever.
Some of my friends have learned this the hard way. The smart ones now carry notebooks.
I’m not exaggerating. I’ve had women stop me mid‑sentence, hold up a finger, and say, “Don’t move. I need to write that down.” My best students figured it out too. They learned that if they waited even a minute to ask me to repeat an insight, I’d look at them like they’d asked me to recite the periodic table in Sanskrit. The idea would be gone — not because it wasn’t good, but because it arrived in one of those brilliant, fleeting flashes that my brain specializes in.
This is the part people misunderstand:
I don’t forget because the idea wasn’t important.
I forget because the idea was too important — too complex, too elegant, too fully formed to linger.
So I take notes. On myself.
It’s not dignified, but it works.
The Strange Mechanics of My Memory
My mind works in two modes.
Mode One: Lightning Bolt
This is where the magic happens. A thought arrives fully assembled — the logic, the phrasing, the example, the punchline. It’s perfect. It’s also volatile. If I don’t capture it immediately, it dissolves like morning fog.
Mode Two: Bedrock
Other things — a historical pattern, a political principle, a line from Machiavelli — stay with me for years. Decades. They become part of the architecture of my thinking.
The problem is that Mode One and Mode Two do not talk to each other.
Mode One produces the brilliance.
Mode Two remembers the scaffolding.
The result is that I often remember why something mattered, but not what I said that made it matter.
This is why I built a career on note‑taking. My Oriental rug website succeeded because I wrote down every flash of insight the moment it appeared. I didn’t trust myself to remember it later — and I was right not to.
The Graduate Student Who Took Notes on Me
Years ago, I had a dear friend in graduate school. Brilliant woman. But one of her courses stretched her just enough that she had to work for every inch. So we’d talk on the phone at night — sometimes for hours — and she’d ask me questions.
Why?
How do you know that?
Can you give me an example?
And I would. Happily. I love explaining things.
What I didn’t realize — what she didn’t tell me until after she graduated — was that she was taking notes. On everything. And then she’d walk into class the next day and repeat my examples, my analogies, my little stories. Apparently they went over quite well.
I don’t say this to elevate myself into some kind of oracle. I’m not. I’m a man who can barely remember what he said five minutes ago. But that’s the point. The forgetting is part of the process. The forgetting is the secret.
If I remembered everything, I’d never need to rediscover anything. And half of what I produce comes from rediscovery — from re‑thinking, re‑phrasing, re‑connecting ideas in new ways.
The Machiavelli Moment
One night, she and I were reading The Prince together — long‑distance, out loud. I love that book. I love it because if you read it slowly enough, sentence by sentence, it becomes crystal clear. Machiavelli wasn’t cryptic. He was precise.
But then we hit the line:
“It is better to be feared than loved.”
She stopped cold. Most people do. They read it as cruelty. Or cynicism. Or medieval political nihilism. But Machiavelli wasn’t talking about sadism. He was talking about predictability. About the psychology of power.
So I gave her an example.
Ronald Reagan, during a sound check, once joked into the microphone:
“I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Everyone in the room laughed.
The Kremlin did not.
When the incident was explained to Gorbachev, he reportedly asked:
“What kind of man jokes about the nuclear destruction of another country?”
That question haunted him.
Because if a man can joke about triggering Armageddon, what else might he do?
Reagan didn’t terrify the Soviets. He unsettled them. He introduced uncertainty. He made them factor in the possibility — however remote — that he might not be entirely predictable.
And that, I told her, is what Machiavelli meant.
She later used that example in class. They loved it.
I had forgotten I’d even said it.
In Conclusion
People assume memory is the engine of intelligence. It isn’t. Not for me. My engine is the flash — the moment when everything aligns and the idea arrives fully formed.
The forgetting isn’t a flaw.
It’s the cost of doing business.
I don’t remember my best ideas because they come from a part of my mind that doesn’t linger. They’re sparks. They’re lightning. They’re meant to be caught, not stored.
So yes, I take notes on myself.
Yes, my friends take notes on me too.
And yes, sometimes my own students quote me back to myself because I’ve forgotten what I said.
But if that’s the price of having a mind that produces these flashes, I’ll pay it.
Happily.
After all — I can always read my notes.
The value isn’t in capturing the flash.
It’s in converting the flash into something that compounds.
Barry this is amazing! Thanks for sharing!!!!