When I was a little kid, I believed that the world stopped moving when I was asleep. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, crawl out of the bed and sneak onto our balcony, looking for a little wooden box behind a big cardboard, in which I secretly stored my clunky early writings, drawings and, of course, love letters.Right in front of the balcony, I would slowly, mischievously step on my toes, look outside and observe the pure, untamed, untangled emptiness and loneliness breathing outside, leaving not even a single leaf on a single tree untouched. I could almost sense how the world fades away, sleeping calmly and gently—and I would be the only person seeing it happening.And then I’d look at my little wooden box. Just for a second. For a blink of a second, actually. Before I open it just to make sure that everything is still inside. Nobody in the entire world knew about this wooden box of mine, and that’s where I found my solace and happiness for years, storing everything from stickers, cards, notes, audio diaries, letters that were never sent and postcards that were never addressed all the way to elaborate drawings and throughly written, rewritten, extended and reedited versions of my little stories. Writing had been my way to escape and understand the unclear, the unknown, the unfair, the unconscious—the things that I just couldn’t make sense of. So every single time I didn’t understand something, I would hold my breath just for a second, look around to make sure that nobody was watching, swiftly grab my shabby sketch book with an attached yellow pencil and write it down quickly before I forgot it—and then run into the bathroom to grab blue scissors and cut the notes as soon as possible and put them in the right place in my little wooden box while nobody else saw it—hoping to find a meaning or a better connection as I become older and smarter. All these notes, all these mysterious fragments of my life, were my little discoveries and my little treasures that I hoped would magically come together one day to open an entirely new understanding of the world for me.As it turns out, the world doesn’t stop moving when you are sleeping. One night, as I was sleeping with my sketchbook right next to me, a strong windy, rainy storm scattered all over the balcony, cracking down the cupboard with a little wooden box inside. As I woke up, I found my notes scattered all over the balcony, turned wet, torn apart, broken, misplaced, unreadable. I was devastated.A few weeks later in school we had to write an essay about the most significant things and experiences in your life. I went to great lengths to describe my little wooden box and how difficult the experience was for me. As you probably can tell, I never was particularly good with commas or semicolons (or dashes or punctuation in general for that matter), so after circling in a number of occasional red marks and notes on the side, my teacher added a little note at the end of my essay. It was too elaborate to remember completely, but I vividly remember a few sentences that made all the difference in the world to me: “You might have lost the notes, but you haven’t lost the experiences. Connect them throughout the years and keep the memory of a little wooden box as a reminder of everything beautiful and amazing you’ve seen, experienced and discovered. This memory is who you really are. It matters. A lot.”I kept tirelessly adding more notes into my sketchbook throughout the years, but I never stored them in a little wooden box at the balcony ever again.——Whenever we join a Twitter conversation or write/read a blog post or interact with our fellows colleagues at conferences, we always discover treasures that often are a perfect fit for our own, personal little wooden boxes. We never know if we can use a new discovery, and often we can’t make a connection right away, and if we don’t capture them, sometimes they fade away over time. The only way to grasp them is to make them tangible.Different tools work best for different people. For me, adding notes in my sketchbook online and offline works best. I also use Twitter to give anything that I discovered a vivid manifestation, giving it a presence on the Web—not only to share it with followers, but also to bookmark it for myself for future reference and immerse into conversations that take place in the stream. That’s why every tweet follows certain conventions in terms of the structure and wording to avoid duplicates and wrong categorization. In fact, you can use Twitter’s search to filter your archive very easily as long as you have consistent writing in your tweets. (Of course, to avoid the “wooden box”-fiasco, I do store regular back-ups of the tweets, too—lesson learned).Having a little place where we can store all those fragments of our experiences can be tremendously helpful. These fragments don’t have to be polished; we tend to think about blog posts as the perfect artefacts of our elaborate efforts, almost sculpture-alike artworks that require time and writing skills, but they could be just your random thoughts or ideas—perhaps just a few little things that you learned one day. #‎onething on Twitter, “One Thing A Day” on your blog, a little sketchbook note at a conference. Writing and speaking about your discoveries is also a wonderful way of capturing new ideas because it sets you off on the path of exploration and inherently forces you to make connections that you otherwise would have missed.And sharing these little wooden boxes matters. A lot. Because you never know who will be inspired by the little fragments of your experience. You never know who will be embarking on their own, new journey once they stumbled upon yours. You never find out about one little girl who jumped into web design because she found a blog post that you wrote about the fascinating community and profession that you are a part of. Or that discouraged young front-end developer who was about to give up before he stumbled upon your Twitter thread. Or a designer tangled in massive redesign issues unsure about his career paths just before you spoke in front of him and explained how you work and what worked well in your last project. These are lives changed at its heart. (And if it happened to you, and a blog post, conversation or a talk made a difference for your life or career, please do take a few minutes of your time to send a little “thank you” email to the person that inspired or helped you. It will be much appreciated.)And before you know it, you’ve made a huge difference, helping people you don’t even know to make better design decisions and potentially better life decisions, and hence filling their little wooden boxes with ideas and thoughts that enrich everything and everybody on the Web.