The Bug List
The other day, my friend and mentor David Kelley told me about a famous old assignment legendary Stanford professor Bob McKim used to give his students: he would tell them to keep a bug list. Mind you, this was decades before computer coding came to prominence, and before that term was re-purposed to mean what it does today. What McKim meant when he instructed students to keep a bug list was something very simple: keep a running list of the things that bother you - the things that “bug” you. (One can’t help but see a connection to Seinfeld’s primary source of new material.) He knew that these lists would be a rich source of potential opportunity areas for students focused on creating innovative new products. And indeed, many of the early design programs innovations can be attributed to students working from such a list.
I haven't been able to track down an original reference for McKim's assignment (yet!), but I was reminded of David's story about it by a conversation I had with a fantastic entrepreneur today. As I've mentioned in this space before, Mar Hershenson and I have been interviewing fabulous female founders for the last few weeks, and today, we spoke with Laura D’Asaro, the incredible co-founder of Chirps, a really cool company with a really cool mission (they received some measure of fame from their success on Shark Tank).
Laura is a serial entrepreneur I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and teaching while she’s a student at Stanford GSB. Her track record includes saving a local park as a teenager, breaking a world record for cancer research, and you know, starting a Cricket-powder snacking company (you see what I did with the title and the McKim reference there? It gets better…). She’s also got several promising businesses in the hopper, and so I was eager to turn the tables and get to ask her some questions.
One of the things that popped out to me was when I asked her about her favorite tools to generate new ideas. She said, “The biggest thing is, I’m hyper-aware of problems. Anytime I find myself feeling annoyed, I write down the problem and think about what I might to do solve it.” She gave the example of an observation she’s made being a newbie to the Bay Area: pumpkins rot pretty quickly around here during the scary-season. Annoyed at this, she’s already planning on “buying 100 pumpkins next Halloween and trying a bunch of things out to see what will prevent rot. I don’t know if it’s a combination of salts, or chemicals, or what, but I’m going to try to figure it out!”
There were MANY points of inspiration in our conversation, but I wanted to call special attention to this simple tactic: keep a bug list. Write down the things that annoy you. Whether you “let go,” or use them as ideation fodder, either way, it’s a simple habit to pick up to fuel your creative practice.
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