"Treat personal near-misses as research hypotheses worth testing Surgery resident Vishal Patel nearly caused a serious accident while fumbling with Spotify after his wife texted him to listen to the new Taylor Swift album. Rather than dismissing the incident, he recognized that 'album release days are basically natural experiments — they're moments where millions of people suddenly now have a reason to pick up their phone and interact with it sometimes while driving.' His near-miss turned into a published study finding a 15% spike in traffic fatalities on major album release days. The lesson: personal experiences of danger, inefficiency, or surprise are often signals pointing at systemic patterns that nobody has yet quantified. Source: Vishal Patel, Freakonomics Radio, Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities"