Your irritation could be your next innovation

One of the most common qualities found in successful entrepreneurs is a sense of curiosity. They all seem to have a knack for asking why things seem to work a certain way or why does it have to be this way? 

Such a sense of curiosity is what often leads to a set of ideas, solutions to existing problems - which then ends up being the foundation for a business. So today, I wanted to pull on this thread a bit more - specifically, to look back at some historical examples to see how a sense of curiosity leads founders to find ideas

One of the main ways founders seem to find ideas is with a problem they’re directly facing or have observed first hand. Something that bothers them, that irritates them, that leads them to ask, “why does it have to be this way?”. I call this the:

Problem-First Approach

Looking back in time, many examples showcase this pattern. Let me give you a couple:

Bette Nesmith Graham was an Executive Assistant in the 1950s. Typewriters had just transitioned from messy ink ribbons to film cartridges. With typewriters non-existent today, this might be hard to understand but basically, Bette was now unable to erase her own mistakes. If she made one typo, she had to re-type the entire page from scratch.

And while Bette was a great Executive Assistant, she was not a great typist. So this irritation really irked her. And what did she do? She found a solution which was first called ‘liquid paper’, but we now know as ‘White Out’. It was a solution that directly helped solve her problem, but the more she probed at this, the more she realized that this was a mainstream problem that many were facing. Eventually, a quarter of a century later, she ended up selling White Out to Gillette for $48 million.

The amazing part about this story is that there was very little innovation. There was no advanced chemistry involved. It was literally white paint in a bottle. The breakthrough here wasn’t the technology, it was the noticing

David Mullany did something similar.

David was frustrated by the damage his son was causing around the home by playing with a regular baseball. The more windows he had to keep fixing, the more this frustration grew on him. And he said to himself, there has to be a better way. So he found one. He took perfume packaging and invented a makeshift ball that served the purpose for his son and was way less damaging. 

We now know his invention as Wiffle Ball. 

Notice the pattern? 

No technological breakthrough.

No billion dollar lab

Just someone refusing to accept daily friction as “normal”

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Both of these examples sound SO SIMPLE and OBVIOUS in hindsight that it begs the question:

What Prevents Innovation?

The biggest obstacle is the idea of learned helplessness. I learned this from a recent Jeff Bezos talk I stumbled upon.

The idea is that people encounter little problems or irritations with products, processes, ways of living every single day. But humans are incredible in that if they continue encountering the problem consistently for long enough, they will literally start seeing past it and will ignore it. 

Can you think of something in your life that would fit this description? For me, it was the back and forth emails to schedule a meeting. For years, that’s how you’d align on a day and time to speak to someone.

“Does Tuesday at 3 work?”

“No, what about Thursday?”

Most people, including me, accepted this as normal. But one person didn’t - that ended up becoming Calendly

Great inventors are bothered by these daily, ordinary problems. It is inherently very difficult to push through the helplessness but it is key to innovation. Mary Anderson is a great example of this.

In the early 1900s, cars didn’t have windshield wipers. When it rained, people would literally pull over, use a rag to clean the windshield, drive another mile and repeat. They thought nothing of this. This was life. They started seeing right through the problem

Mary thought this was ridiculous. She went on to invent the windshield wiper. At first, she was criticized - people came up with all the reasons why it wouldn’t work: biggest one being the distraction it would cause for drivers. But she persisted. 

Within a decade, wipers were standard equipment on all cars. Mary’s solution to the problem again seems obvious in hindsight but most people did not even see the irritation they were facing as a true problem to solve. 

So the next time you get irritated by something in daily life, don’t say “it sucks it has to be this way”. 

Instead, just like David Mullany did, ask yourself, “why does it have to be this way”?