The Dumpster Dive Principle

Everything I make is garbage #

I think people want new things too much. Open up Amazon or McMaster and buy the solution. Email a VC, get a mil, and spend 3–6 months making a brand new thing from scratch.

And then everyone’s unhappy when it actually takes longer. Or isn’t the thing they wanted in the first place.

Turns out they realize they don’t even know what they want.

My daughter wanted to be a cowgirl this Halloween. She’s 11. It’s getting harder and harder to do things with her. Natural of course. She has friends. Wants us around less. The whole independence rite of passage.

So there’s some stakes to trying to figure out how to naturally fit into her vision of Halloween. How can I lean into what she wants? All casual like :)

And I struggled. What on earth can I be? A cow was too obvious. A horse too weird. My brain for a second started to freeze up.

But I went back to my time-proven technique for getting out of most problems: start with trash.

Literally, what can I do with these boxes we’re about to throw out from Amazon deliveries? If I put the boxes around me like one of my robot costumes, what could this look like? Oh! A cactus. I could color it green and use toothpicks or something to make needles.

Voilà. Some scraps and paper and glue and a few bucks on pipe cleaners (I thought the toothpicks might poke a kids eye out), and I had a costume that easily fit my daughter’s vibe. And I could feel a little like I was part of the crew :)

I try to spend a majority of my time solving the problems in my life with trash. Sure, mostly metaphorical trash. But every now and then it’s this costume. Actual trash.

Last week at work we released a bunch of new features made from… not exactly something you’d call trash, but definitely something easy to dismiss because we already had most of the parts laying around. And because we repurposed what we already had, prototypes were delivered in just a few days. Which made green-lighting the actual productizing an easy decision and follow-up task.

And if you keep your eye out for trash, you realize we discard so, so much. That idea you put aside because it didn’t work for whatever reason probably has a life as something else. Even if it’s just a blog post about why it sucked.

Sometimes you realize the trash was actually a good idea to begin with. The first iPhone that shipped was largely a prototype they had already thrown away.

Faced with a dead end, Jony’s team reversed course. They turned to an old model they’d made early in the process but had discarded in favor of the Sandwich and Extrudo. The discarded model looked very similar to the phone that would actually ship.
— Kahney, Leander. Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products (p. 224).

If there’s one thing I wish I could instill in more people: stop looking for so many new things. You don’t need a brand new world of money, parts, whatever to put your vision together.

Sure, you might be making the next thing no one on earth has ever seen before. But just like the iPhone inspiration coming from trash—or features or prototypes or costumes—it’s highly likely the correct first step to make the thing you want is lying in a trash bin right next to you.

Creativity isn’t about having more. It’s about noticing what you already threw away.