02/12/2025
I had an idea in the shower the other morning.
A brilliant one.
One of those rare, clean, perfectly-formed ideas that appears fully assembled the moment the hot water hits the back of your neck.
By the time I dried off, it had completely vanished.
Gone.
Evaporated.
Dissolved into steam like it never existed.
And there’s something deeply unfair about that, isn’t there?
Your brain comes alive at the most inconvenient moments —
in the shower, on a walk, while chopping onions —
but never when you’re staring at the blank page trying to think “professionally.”
There’s actually a reason for this.
When you step away from work — literally or mentally — your brain switches into a different mode.
The subconscious puts the puzzle pieces together while the conscious mind is too busy looking for the shampoo.
It’s why some of history’s greatest thinkers swore by it.
Darwin took long walks around the Sandwalk, letting ideas creep up on him like shy animals.
Beethoven kept a notebook in his coat so he could scribble down motifs mid-walk before they escaped.
Einstein claimed his best insights came while sailing — he’d drift, the boat would drift, and the ideas would drift in too.
Agatha Christie solved crimes (fictionally, I should add) while washing dishes.
None of them relied on remembering the idea later.
They understood the mind’s favourite trick:
it gives you brilliance at 8:03am in the bathroom and expects you to recall it at 8:17am in your office.
It doesn’t work like that.
You have to catch ideas when they arrive — not when it’s convenient.
If it means keeping a notebook by the shower, do it.
If it means stepping out dripping wet and typing into your phone like a man escaping a sauna, fine.
If it means pausing your walk to jot down three messy words that won’t make sense until tomorrow — perfect.
The quality of the capture matters far less than the act of capturing.
Because ideas are like visitors.
If you greet them, they stay.
If you ignore them, they wander off to someone who’s paying attention.
And here’s the part no one wants to admit:
You probably already had five world-class thoughts this month.
They just didn’t survive the towel-drying stage.
So catch the next one.
Before it slips down the drain with the soap.
𝗝𝗼𝗵𝗻 “𝗖𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗕𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗘𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗲” 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗱𝘆-𝗥𝗶𝗰𝗲
