Charles Dickens' Pet Bird Influences Millions Of People Today, A Teen Girl's Deodorant Impacts Rock History, And Dr. Seuss Helps a Real Estate Company: Why Good Ideas Don't Care Where They Come From
The 3-Word Quote: “Combining Is Creativity”
Please subscribe, if you’re new here.
***originally published 2/3/24
1.
There is a dead bird in the Free Library of Philadelphia.
The stuffed blackbird has been dead for 183 years and is the library's star attraction.
The taxidermied bird has been housed in Philadelphia for the last 50 years. But he lived his life in London.
And there's a good reason it's the library's star attraction - the bird influenced two of the world's most famous authors.
The bird's name was Grip, and Grip was the beloved pet of British author Charles Dickens.
You know Charles Dickens - he wrote A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations.
Much has been written about Dickens' pet bird, Grip. Grip is often described as somewhat bothersome, and while alive, he frequently pecked at various items and people.
But Dickens loved Grip.
The author even made a large black raven a central character in Barnaby Rudge, one of his lesser-known novels.
And the bird in this novel caught the attention of a soon-to-be-famous writer.
Edgar Allan Poe.
You know Edgar Allan Poe, too. He wrote Tell-Tale Heart and Annabel Lee.
According to one source, Poe read Barnaby Rudge and wrote a review of the Dickens novel.
In the review, Poe is so taken with the raven in the story that he comments that Dickens should have expanded the bird's role in the book.
Poe loved the bird, too.
So, upon hearing that Dickens was touring the United States on a speaking and reading tour, Poe decided he needed to meet the famous author.
In March of 1842, the two literary giants (although Poe wasn't as well known then) met for a meal.
Grip's recent death was said to be a topic of conversation.
Then, in January 1845, Poe published his most famous work, The Raven.
Poe's poem was a smashing success, and the struggling poet gained fame.
So, a somewhat dumb, large, black raven heavily influenced two famous writers in the 1800s.
Somewhat interesting.
But Dickens' pet bird influences millions of people today - and most have no idea how.
2.
It started with a wild party and ended with graffiti on a bedroom wall.
Kathleen Hanna was the lead singer of Bikini Kill, an influential punk band, and a vital member of the area's prominent music scene.
She was connected with countless musicians and lived the life of an aspiring rockstar.
One evening, Hanna and many friends gathered for a large party at a fellow musician's apartment.
The party got out of control.
In an interview about the party that night, Hanna said she got drunk, insulted everybody, threw up on someone, smashed things in the apartment, and then took a Sharpie and wrote gibberish graffiti all over her friend's bedroom wall.
Then she passed out with the marker in her hand.
Stereotypical rock star behavior, perhaps.
But Hanna woke up embarrassed and with a massive hangover.
No one else thought much of that night or her behavior.
And Hanna was grateful for the night to be forgotten.
Except six months later, a friend called her with a question.
It was a specific question.
About that party six months before.
And the question changed rock music history.
3.
Rich Barton should probably be a household name.
He should likely be mentioned in the discussion with Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson.
In 2002, MIT Technology Review named him one of the top ten innovators under 35.
You don't make lists like that by accident.
Barton attended Stanford University with an engineering degree and went to work for Microsoft after graduation.
In 1996, while working at Microsoft, he founded Expedia.
You have likely used Expedia, the huge travel booking website that made 11 billion dollars in revenue last year.
But Barton wasn't done.
In 2007, he co-founded Glassdoor, a website that allows employees to review companies and assists job searchers in making career decisions.
In 2018, Glassdoor was sold for 1.2 billion dollars.
But sandwiched between those companies, Barton founded another giant tech company.
The company was the real-estate site Zillow.
Zillow had two billion dollars in revenue in 2022.
Expedia. Glassdoor. Zillow.
And Barton founded or co-founded each of them.
Billion-dollar tech companies, all.
However, one small decision, a non-technical one, a non-financial one, still had to be made regarding what this real estate company should be called.
Obviously, Zillow was ultimately selected.
But where did this unusual name come from?
It seems just to be a made-up word.
But some say the word existed decades earlier.
And the word came from an unlikely source.
The Takeaway:
So what do Charles Dickens' pet bird, graffiti written on a wall at a party, a picture book, and a real estate website all have in common?
Well, on the surface, not much.
However, each of these stories exemplifies where ideas come from.
And each demonstrates the maxim that good ideas don't care where they come from - in short, ideas can happen anywhere at any time.
But you have to be willing and open to create them.
Let's connect the dots.
We know Dickens had a beloved pet raven.
We know a raven played a considerable role in his novel Barnaby Rudge.
And we know the bird was a star in Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven.
Both authors were fascinated and influenced by the bird named Grip.
But hundreds of thousands of people who may not be literature fans celebrate this bird even today.
You see, Poe died in Baltimore, Maryland.
In the 1990s, years after Baltimore's professional football team moved to Indianapolis, the National Football League awarded the city of Baltimore a new football team.
And the team needed a name and a mascot.
The city wanted to keep the 'Colts' name, but Indianapolis held the rights.
So, the owners of the Baltimore team created a focus group to brainstorm mascot names for their team.
The process took months; most of the names were not good.
But the group trimmed the list to five contenders for a fan vote.
The choices included Americans, Marauders, Mustangs, Railers, and Ravens.
The Ravens.
The name 'The Ravens' won in a landslide vote. The people of Baltimore had spoken.
David Modell, a team owner, said of the new name, "The name tested well. It's a strong nickname that is not common to teams at any level, and it means something historically to this community."
'Something historically to this community."
It meant that the owners understood Poe's impact and connection to Baltimore.
So, The Ravens were selected as the name for Baltimore's new NFL team. The team was connected to Poe and named after his most famous poem.
But without knowing it, Baltimore football fans voted to name their team after a poem inspired by Charles Dickens' pet bird, which died in 1841.
Good ideas don't care where they came from.
***
Bikini Kill's lead singer had a pretty rough night in Seattle.
Alcohol was consumed, insults were hurled, furniture was broken, and walls were tagged with drunken graffiti.
Hanna was hoping no one would remember a night she wished to forget.
But six months later, she picked up the phone. The musician who hosted the party was on the line.
The musician wanted to talk to Hanna about the night of that party. He had a particular question for her.
He wanted to know about something she had scribbled on his bedroom wall with that Sharpie.
It was a phrase she had written while drunk, and she had included her friend's name in the words on the wall.
But her friend wasn't calling to shame her about that night.
He remembered the phrase from months ago - it had stuck with him.
He liked the phrase a lot. And as a musician and a writer, he was calling to see if he could use those words in a song he was writing.
Hanna, relieved he wasn't upset about her actions at the party, recalled the conversation.
She said, "I was like, as long as I can get out of this conversation, I'm totally cool. You can use whatever you want."
So, how did this drunken graffiti change music history?
You see, her friend's name was Kurt.
And Kurt couldn't get one line from his mind that Hanna wrote on his bedroom wall.
The scribbled line said, "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit."
'Smells like Teen Spirit.'
The words stuck with Kurt.
So when Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana were writing songs for the Nevermind album, those words came to mind.
He called Hanna for permission to use those words, wrote a song, and created a rock anthem.
Smells Like Teen Spirit was born.
The song was a sensation in the 1990s.
It sounded like nothing else, and it rocketed up the charts and catapulted Cobain and Nirvana into superstardom.
A Guardian article said of the song: "Smells Like Teen Spirit is generally considered to be one of the epochal songs in the history of rock 'n' roll."
And it came from a drunken night and graffiti on a bedroom wall.
But there was something that Hanna didn't tell her friend Kurt Cobain about the phrase.
You see, Teen Spirit was the name of a relatively popular deodorant at the time aimed at teen girls.
And it was the deodorant that Cobain's girlfriend, Tobi Vail, used at the time. Vail was also in Bikini Kill.
Hanna thought Kurt smelled faintly of his girlfriend's deodorant, so she wrote the thought on his wall while drunk.
So, a song that changed music history was named after Kurt Cobain's girlfriend's deodorant.
Like Baltimore's football team's name, a good idea can come from anywhere - if you're prepared for it and open to being influenced by anything.
A dead bird owned by a British novelist and a teenage girl's deodorant from the 1990s both led to ideas and names that impact millions of people today.
But we often let parts of ideas float away. We don't write down things that could be important later because often ideas come to us in parts, not fully formed. We need to store and later recall those fragments that can be turned into a whole.
We often don't pay attention to connections.
And connections are crucial in creativity.
***
Remember Rich Barton?
He had great ideas already - he founded Expedia, Glassdoor, and Zillow.
He seemed to have no shortage of ideas.
His ideas were grand and successful and impacted millions of people.
But when finding a name for his real estate company, he came up with Zillow.
Zillow.
It's a somewhat odd name.
The company's line says, "Zillions of data points for homes, accessible to everyone."
Zillions - a large number. The word transforms into Zillow, perhaps.
Another origin story is that Zillow is a blended word - combining zillions, meaning many, and pillow, representing all the bedrooms of the homes on the site.
Zillions + pillow = Zillow.
However, a few have suggested that Dr. Seuss inspired the company name.
Barton and others dispute this—either because it simply isn't true or because admitting the name came from Dr. Seuss could mean Zillow might have to pay to use the rights to the name.
The book There's a Wocket in My Pocket is silly and has some made-up words.
One page says:
'But the Zillow
On my Pillow
Always helps me fall asleep.'
Some think this page inspired the founders to create their company name.
The name is memorable, one-syllable, and easy to spell and type in a web address bar.
It checks off many boxes for what a company looks for in a good name.
And it might have come from Dr. Seuss.
The Ravens, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Zillow.
All great names.
And they were all great ideas - no matter where the idea came from.
Where an idea comes from isn't always consequential.
What matters is that people searching for ideas need to be ready to receive them - to look for connections.
It's crucial to look at how things are - and work to see how they can be adapted to achieve a better and more useful outcome.
Can you see one thing and see other possibilities for it - to see how it can be used differently?
That's creativity.
A poem about an English writer's pet can become an NFL mascot.
The name of a teen girl's deodorant can become the name of an iconic song.
A line in a children's book could be the origin of the name of a billion-dollar real estate company.
All the ideas seemed silly initially, but all worked because people looked to see how something that existed in one way could be combined with something else.
Combining and connecting is the essence of creativity.
It's a skill.
But you must be open to possibilities - even ones that initially seem silly.
3 things before you go:
Watch: The night the goalpost went for a swim; this is how you celebrate a major football upset; a good night for my daughter’s college (and a bad night for her friend who broke his ankle trying to rush the field)
Listen: seems like a song to add to a soundtrack for sitting on your back porch with a lime in a bottle watching fall; a unique cover of a classic song
Listen: another song recommendation from my other daughter;
Thanks for reading!
-Jeff