Irritation Becomes Inspiration
A taught exercise that converts a photograph of something that annoyed you tonight into a product idea.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 87%
English teaches this as a lecture on where creativity comes from and has run it at Berklee College of Music, Dartmouth's film school, RISD, and more traditional universities. The mechanic is a forcing constraint on timing. If he teaches Thursday at five, he has the professor email students Wednesday at five telling them to take a picture of something that annoys them tonight. Not a photo taken yesterday, not one found on Google, tonight. The freshness requirement is what stops students from retrieving a sanitized memory and forces them to actually notice friction in real time. He then walks the class through a specific exercise on how any problem can become the motivation for a product. English runs his own companies on the same input: he says his ideas are mostly scratching his own itch, and every one of his roughly 300 domain names has a Google Doc attached with the idea behind it.
Origin
English developed it as a university lecture on where creativity comes from and has delivered it at art, music, film, and traditional schools alike.
Core principles
- 01Annoyance is the most reliable and least valued signal of unmet demand
- 02The photo must be from tonight, not from memory
- 03Any problem can become the motivation for a product
- 04Capture the idea somewhere durable the moment you have it
- 05You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so ideate with ideators
How to run it
- 1
Set a same-night capture window
Give yourself exactly one evening to collect. English sends the instruction 24 hours before the class so students have a hard, short window rather than an open-ended assignment they will satisfy from memory.
Pro tip The 24-hour gap is the mechanism, not an administrative detail. Widen it and the exercise stops working.
- 2
Photograph something that annoys you tonight
Take an actual picture of the irritation as you encounter it. English is explicit that a photo taken yesterday or found on Google does not count, because the point is to retrain your noticing rather than to produce an artifact.
- 3
Convert the irritation into the underlying problem
Move from the specific annoyance to the general problem it represents. English's own examples show the pattern: not knowing where to meet someone in an unfamiliar part of New York became a problem about finding a midpoint venue between arbitrary locations.
- 4
Turn the problem into a product motivation
Ask what artifact would make the irritation stop existing. English built middle.net because he could not find a way to pick a bar between two locations, and funcontact.com because swapping contact details at conferences required typing in phone numbers.
- 5
Capture it durably before it evaporates
Give every surviving idea a home. English buys the domain and attaches a Google Doc to it, so roughly 300 domains double as an indexed vault of 300 written-up ideas rather than a list of dead registrations.
Watch out An uncaptured idea is functionally the same as never having had it.
- 6
Triage into itch-scratchers and swings
Separate the small things you build for yourself from the ones you think could be enormous. At Boston Venture Studio English has nine apps under development explicitly split between fun itch-to-scratch releases shipped with source code and swing-for-the-fences bets.
In the wild
English lives in Boston but spends time in New York, and knew the West Village, Tribeca, and Soho but not the Upper East or West Side. Being unable to pick a meeting spot with someone uptown annoyed him enough that he bought middle.net and built an app that grabs each person's location from the browser and suggests a coffee shop or bar in the middle.
→ A working app he uses himself, which he is candid will never make money, built purely because the irritation was real and unresolved.
English, who describes himself as shy and introverted, found swapping details at conferences irritating because it meant typing phone numbers and email addresses. He built funcontact.com, a set of QR codes where each code exposes a different slice of his information depending on who he is meeting.
→ He used it the night before the interview at a restaurant in the West Village, scanning his details to four people in the fashion industry who were still messaging him about the Bipolar Social Club the next day.
Common mistakes
Using a remembered annoyance instead of a fresh one
English bans photos from yesterday or from Google for a reason. Recalled irritations arrive already rationalized and edited, which strips out the specificity that makes the exercise generate real problems.
Assuming your itch is everyone's itch
English's own warning is that founders get obsessed with a little problem and work on it for ten years without realizing not many people share it. The exercise generates candidate problems, not validated markets, and skipping that distinction is how you get a beautiful product nobody cares about.
Capturing nothing and relying on memory
Without a durable capture step the exercise produces a pleasant evening and no assets. English's 300 domains each carrying a Google Doc exist precisely so that the idea survives the moment the irritation fades.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who believes they are not creative and needs a repeatable source of product ideas from their own life
Not ideal for
Teams that already have a validated problem and need execution rather than ideation
From the transcript
“At Wednesday at 5:00, I'll have the professor email the students and say, take a picture of something tonight that annoys you. Not a picture…”
“And then I teach the students about how irritation becomes inspiration and how any problem can become the motivation for a product. And we go…”
“I own about 300 domain names and every domain name has a Google Doc associated with the idea for the company.”
“I built that cuz I needed it. I don't think it'll ever become a company, but I just wanted that, so I built it.”
From the episode
Paul English: How He Built And Sold 6 Companies And Why He Believes Irritation Becomes Inspiration
Paul English