How Much Can Your Barrel Hold?

Ever since I was a kid,

my parents kept a rain barrel on the side of their house.

They still have one.

It’s one of those big blue plastic drums that you see piled up at industrial sites.

That barrel can hold 55 gallons (208 liters) of water.

(Which is a decent amount)

With 55 gallons of water you can water a good sized garden for a week (or even longer)

The crazy thing is:

It doesn’t take very long for the barrel to fill up when it’s raining.

An hour or two of light rain will fill the empty barrel right back up to the brim.

Once the barrel is full, all the extra water that continues to rain in pours through an overflow pipe and runs down the rain spout.

55 gallons is the limit. You can’t get any more in there.

Our minds kind of work like that too.

Every book you read

Every podcast you listen to

Every YouTube video you watch

Every article, newsletter, blog post you devour

They all fill up your barrel (your mind).

And once you reach the limit of what you can hold in there:

Ideas start to pour over the edge and run down into the lawn.

Some people can hold a larger volume of ideas than others (60 gallons? 100?)

But the fact is:

Our minds aren’t any safer of a place to store ideas long term-

-than a rain barrel is to store water.

So write them down,

Type them out,

Record them,

Put them on paper (or on a screen).

And click the save button.

Great new ideas fall down from the sky every day.

Make sure you take good care of the ones you catch in your barrel.

- Brent