Gather Conceptual Legos

What are jokes made of?

Jason Sudeikis (aka Ted Lasso) was asked where the material for the big, emotional scenes in a comedy about football come from. “They come from us talking about our lives, speaking honestly and vulnerably about our own experiences and traumas. It’s just like, when you’re writing for SNL, you spend your whole Sunday having some experience so that you have something to write about on Monday and Tuesday.”

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of fresh inputs — what we call “inspiration” — to drive fresh thinking. Input drives output. What’s true of jokes, and stories, is true of ideas in business as well: they’re built from component parts.

You can think about ideas as stacks of lego pieces. To come up with an idea, just put two conceptual “building blocks” together. Voilá. It’s really that simple.

Interestingly enough, I found a relevant example after meeting Bob Metcalfe. After our conversation, I went back through old notes, and found this gem:

“If Metcalfe could not come up with something to fill in the blank (of a serious network issue as a new employee at Xerox PARC), the matter would be taken out of his hands—which would be not only a challenge to his intellectual authority as the network guy, but a blow to his pride.

That dismal outcome was averted when he suddenly recalled a concept he had first encountered months earlier. Back in June, while visiting Washington on ARPANET business, he had lodged on the guest room sofa-bed of his friend Steve Crocker, an ARPA program manager. Late that night he pulled down from a handy bookshelf a heavy volume of papers from an obscure technical conference, ‘a sure cure for jet-lag sleeplessness,’ and lumbered his way through one written by a University of Hawaii professor named Norman Abramson…

Over the next few months, Metcalfe worked to adapt it to the center’s high-volume, high-performance specifications… On May 22, 1973, he drafted his first memo describing the concept for PARC’s patent attorneys. Subject: ‘The ETHER Network.’”

Ethernet — that fantastic innovation — was born of the combination of a new problem, in a new context, with an old idea, from an obscure context. And Bob Metcalfe was one of the few people who saw both of these “legos” (ie conceptual pieces, no different from the experiences SNL writers seek on Sundays), and put them together.

The important thing is, as we see from his late night read through a technical paper, he was in the habit of gathering legos, even before he knew how they might be used. This is how both wildly inventive and wildly creative people work.

As Twitter-friend turned real-life-friend, Michael Crawford, recently explained to me about conferences: “A lot of times, I don’t even know what I’m going to do with this information (from the conference sessions), but I know that I’ll be glad that it’s in there. It ends up connecting with stuff I never could have anticipated.”

I bet Metcalfe and Sudeikis feel the same way.

Related: Input —> Output
Related: Recombine Existing Parts
Related: Approach Your Heroes
Related: Gathering Firewood

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