The physics of capturing our ideas

There are only three ways to capture an idea. You speak it, you write it or you draw it.

Any single idea lives one of three lives: it evaporates, it calcifies, or it expands. And the first (and potentially biggest) element that decides which fate it meets? Whether we capture it in time.

Ideas, in my experience, can be impolite assholes. They knock on the door mid-shower. They scratch at my bed post at 2 a.m. when the brain should be off-duty.

And yet, everything humans have ever made started from one of these three capture moves. The Sistine Chapel was once a sketch. The phrase “I have a dream” was ink on paper. Every song you love (or hate) was mumbled into a recorder or scribbled in a notebook margin.

Or perhaps the Sistine Chapel was dictated, your favorite song was a crude drawing and MLK’s idealistic words were first captured onto a magnetic tape.

Therein lies the crux of this post.

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The triangle of capture

Every idea has three doors. In other words, there are only three ways through which we can trap an idea before it vanishes. You either:

• speak it

• write it

• draw it

That’s it.

It’s not a hierarchy so much as a triangle of capture. Each side of the triangle leans into a different instinct.

Speaking is impulsive and raw. You grab a voice memo, call yourself, mutter lines into your phone. It can be sloppy, but it preserves rhythm and tone.

Writing is deliberate but fast. A napkin, a sticky note, an app. Writing traps some initial bones so the idea can flesh out later, but at the same time can evolve an idea word by word.

Drawing is on the one side primal, and on the other the most thorough for capturing grand ideas. Arrows, boxes, and visual metaphors preserve shape and insinuate connection when words are clumsy, too slow, or too small.

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The door matters

While the act of capture is what saves an idea from evaporation, the door we choose plays a big, and often unspoken, role in the way it grows.

Take, for example, that inimitable speech from August 28, 1963, but before it was its complete and generation-shaking diatribe. I’ll add that I don’t know the exact path it took to reach its final form, but let’s play with the possibilities.

The kernel of this idea: “I have a dream.”

If it began as spoken words: Imagine King pacing his study, speaking to himself, letting the phrases tumble unclean. Spoken capture gives rhythm before logic. The cadence comes first, and breath leads the thought. Even if the words weren’t exact, there was music to them, a heartbeat before it became a body. Speaking stretches ideas toward rhythm and resonance.

If it began as written notes: Now imagine it as ink on paper. Lines scratched, crossed out, reordered. Written capture forces clarity early. It builds bones before breath—edges, arguments, progression. The speech, in this path, would grow first as a skeleton of ideas to be fleshed out later. Writing stretches ideas toward order and argument.

If it began as sketches or diagrams: Picture arrows, circles, and boxes, a visual outline the status quo. Or instead of a diagram, a vision of the dream itself. Drawn capture gives shape and lets the idea occupy space as something we can point to or pull from. In this form, the speech could have existed as an architecture (in the case of a diagram) or a feeling (in the case of a drawing). Either is scaffolding to be built. Drawing stretches ideas toward relationship, whether logical or emotional.

None of these is inherently “better” than the others. But each gives any idea an early bias, stretching it in a different direction.

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Most of us gravitate to one method

Almost everyone defaults to one (maybe two) capture methods. Writers write. Designers sketch. Podcasters talk. We stay where we’re comfortable. And for good reason. Comfort and speed are bed-fellows.

But that comfort can be restrictive in a couple of ways.

First, we force our idea down a known path. A path where we work faster, sure, but one where we often tread, our synapses often fire, and our wheels are more deeply tread.

Second, we deprive ourselves of a more well-rounded approach. Or if nothing else, practice. It makes us a little more brittle, more dependent on one channel (and the underlying skill that channel relies upon).

But what if, as someone who usually writes ideas, you try speaking them? You’ll notice the rhythm you’ve been missing. If you draw, you might start noticing shapes, connections, and patterns.

The unfamiliar mode doesn’t just grow our idea—it grows us. It makes us less brittle. It improves how we speak, improves how we draw, improves our hand writing.

It makes us more fluent in the raw language of creativity.

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How AI extends the triangle

I’ve found the healthiest way to view the role of AI is this: reduce friction after capture so seeds become seedlings.

This takes multiple forms.

Capturing better

Many ideas die (or at least enter an indefinite state of cryogenics) in an inbox or an old notebook. And for the sake of time alone, they become hard to revisit.

Additionally, we can treat raw capture as a first draft of understanding, then run it through loops that makes it easier to use or digitize.

• Voice to skimmable transcript: Record freely, then auto-transcribe with timestamps and a 5-bullet summary. Ask for a highlight reel (“pull the 3 most original sentences and the unanswered questions I posed”).

• Sketch to labeled diagram: Snap your notebook page or whiteboard. Extract the text, label shapes (“box: problem, arrow: dependency”), and return a clean, vector-style version alongside an interpretation.

• Messy note to atomic notes: Paste a rambly paragraph and ask for “atomic notes”, one idea per line with suggested tags. Append a “continue here” prompt to make it easier to pick up the next action.

Imagine a world where you could adopt a “72-hour rule”: every capture becomes skimmable, searchable, and tagged within three days. What a way to prevent decay.

Doing more with what we capture

Most people stop at “saving” when momentum comes from “reshaping.”

A captured idea is a seed. Growth comes from changing frames—audience, format, constraint—and from quick, low-stakes iteration.

Find small, repeatable transformations that explore the idea while respecting your voice.

• Progressive elaboration: Ask for a tight outline from your capture, then one level deeper (“expand section 2 into three beats with examples I could steal from my own work”).

• One seed, three outputs: For any capture, create multiple fast forms a 100-word paragraph, a 5-slide storyboard, and a 30-second voice script. Each surface reveals its own blind spots.

• Angle matrix: Test your idea across three lenses—who (audience), what (promise), how (tone). “Reframe this for a beginner/peer/executive,” “strengthen the promise without hype,” “try warm, dry, and bold tones.”

Feeling better about killing ideas

Letting go hurts, so we cling and clutter grows. A lot of ideas deserve mercy, and most “dead” ideas still contain living parts that we can salvage those.

AI can help by enabling rituals to extract value, save energy, and make killing ideas liberating.

• Stress-test the foundation: Drop a fresh idea into a prompt: “What’s the strongest version of this idea—and what’s its weakest?” If the weaknesses outweigh the strengths, you’ve learned something crucial.

• Audience check: Ask “Who would care about this idea, and why? Who definitely wouldn’t?” If the “wouldn’t” list is longe (or the audience feels misaligned) that’s a sign it may not be worth pursuing.

• Analyze the effort-to-payoff ratio: Use a blunt test like “On a scale of 1–10, how much effort would this take to execute well, and what’s the potential payoff?” If the gap between those numbers feels too wide, kill it before it drains energy.

• Idea autopsy: When an idea stalls, ask for a one-minute autopsy: “List what’s working (hooks, lines, insights), what’s weak, and three places these parts could be reused.” Save the parts as new ideas or ingest them into stronger ones. You can even ask for a one-sentence principle to reuse.

Killing ideas gets easier when you see them revived in new forms. Beyond that, AI can help us extend our time and reframe quitting as craft.

All of which is to say, the goal isn’t to replace the act of capturing our ideas, but to multiply the return on them. And for anyone with confidence in the strength (and dare I say goodness) of their ideas, that can feel rewarding, if not noble.

Until next time.

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