Indeed we miss a lot of things in a daily basis. To prevent missing something truly important to you, make it your habit to write things down. It doesn’t have to be neatly organized. Just write down your thought, inspiration or a word that grasped your mind for the moment.
We are surrounded by a tremendous amount of stimuli everyday. An estimate says we get 30 to 40 million bits of visual information per second . That’s a lot!
But despite of the volume of information, we hardly feel overwhelmed with it. Why? Because only very little of it is registered in our conscious mind.
This means most things come and go very quickly. We consistently forget.
Then what do we remember? Only important things stay in our mind? Not necessary.
The stimuli you get are filtered by the subconscious criteria. For example, we naturally pay attention on something red. The parts orientation and location affect on people’s information process, too. A good design is always based on the natural human behavior.
Today’s marketing experts know such a mechanism and use it to sell what they want to sell. It can be manipulation to spotlight what they want you to see and discreet anything inconvenient for them. We all know the advertisement with big letters of ‘Free’ whatever comes with the tiny letters to impose the conditions. The big letters catch the customers’ eyes much more effectively, but often the little writing is the more critical information to them.
The truly important information is often not so obvious.
When you worry about something, what happens in your mind? Your mind is occupied with your imagination. It is not really the problem itself but your imagination that makes you worry. The truly important information is the facts if you really want to deal with the problem, but worry is more sensational and your focus goes to it automatically.
When you think about your life, you may look at others first. Your friend, colleague or a movie star has such a wardrobe, drives such a car, lives in such a house, eats such foods and has such a lifestyle. You see this and that on the internet. Such things are trend now. Then you start wishing those. Your mind gets occupied with many attractive images of others. But the truly important information is inside you. And we are often too busy chasing others to listen to yourself honestly.
I usually write my blog in the morning because I get the inspiration the most right after I wake up. It’s not uncommon an artist gets the inspiration when he is in the bathroom. The effect of meditation is known to relax your brain and improve your creativity and productivity.
When you are relaxed and off guard, the truly important information comes to you. As it is not always associated with your usual thoughts, sometimes you feel it’s out of the blue. But, if you feel something with it, write it down.
You may not review it ever again, but the time and action you took to write it down certainly register the information into somewhere inside you. And one day, it comes back to your life in a mysterious way.
So write it down. Even if you don’t know why you write it down now, you may see the reason long time after.