Non-Obvious 2017 Edition. Rohit Bhargava
You don’t need to become a poet overnight, but some of these principles can help you get better at creating more elegant descriptions of your own ideas.
For example, think back to the last time you encountered something that was poetically written. It may have been something you once read in school, or perhaps a Dr. Seuss book that you read to a child at bedtime.
Dr. Seuss in particular had a beautiful talent for sharing big ideas with a simplicity and elegance:
“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.”
“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
“Everything stinks till it’s finished.”
We love to read or see elegant stories and we delight in their ability to help us get the big picture with ease, but they do not seem quite so simple to develop or write. If you have ever sat down with paper or in front of a computer screen and tried to tell a simple story you know that it is not an easy challenge.
But we all have the power to simplify our ideas and share them in more elegant ways. To illustrate how, let me take you behind the scenes of the process I used in previous trend reports to name my trends.
REAL LIFE ADVICE (3 WAYS TO THINK MORE ELEGANTLY TODAY)
1 Start with the Obvious – One of my favorite trends from my 2015 Non-Obvious Trend Report was something I called Selfie Confidence. The name was a play on “Self Confidence” and was written to force people to reevaluate something they already knew about and see it in a new light. Selfies are seen as demonstrations of narcissism - but this trend introduced the idea that selfies could actually contribute to helping people grow their self-confidence. The new perspective and unexpected name made this one of the most popular trends from my report that year.
2 Keep It Short – One thing you will notice if you look back on any of my previous trend reports is that most trends are no longer than two words. Elegance often goes hand in hand with simplicity and this usually means using as few words as possible. When it comes to defining and curating ideas, it is perfectly fine to start by describing them with as many words as you need. When you get to the point of trying to add more elegance, though, a necessary component will usually be reducing the words you use to name and describe it.
3 Use Poetic Principles – There are some basic principles that poets use when writing that can also be helpful for anyone who is curating trends. One of them is to try and use metaphors and imagery instead of obvious ways of sharing something. Another is to rhyme words or use alliteration to add symmetry to an idea. If you flip to Part II of this book, you will see many places where I used these principles to describe trends like “Preserved Past” or “Lovable Unperfection.” A trend from my first report in 2011, Likeonomics, even inspired me to write a book with the same title a year later.
WHAT TO READ
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman – Lightman was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities and is a trained physicist and a poet. His book Einstein’s Dreams has been one of my favorites for years because of how it imagines what Einstein’s dreams must have been like and explores them in a beautiful way through short chapters with interesting assumptions about time and space. This is not a book of poetry, but it will introduce you to the power of poetic writing while also offering the most elegant description of how time might actually work that you’ll ever read.
Why These 5 Habits?
Looking back, the fact that I shared these particular habits to help you learn the art of curating ideas may seem a bit random. What makes these five habits stand out? The fact is, the process of how I came to these five was an interesting exercise of curation in itself.
Over the past several years, I read interviews with professional art curators and how they learned their craft. I bought more than a dozen books written by trend forecasters, futurists and innovators. I interviewed dozens of top business leaders and authors. I carefully studied my own behavior, and (as I mentioned earlier in the chapter) I tested the effectiveness and resonance of these habits by teaching them to my students at Georgetown University and to business professionals in private workshops.
Ultimately, I selected the five habits presented in this chapter because they were the most helpful, descriptive, easy to learn and effective once you learn to put them into action.
So as a final recap before we get started with a step-by-step approach to curating trends, let’s do a quick review:
THE 5 HABITS OF TREND CURATORS
1 Being curious means asking questions about why things work the way they do, and embracing unfamiliar situations or topics with a sense of wonder, and commitment to learning.
2 Being observant means training yourself to see the details that most others often miss.
3 Being fickle means capturing ideas without feeling the need to fully understand or analyze them in that moment.
4 Being thoughtful means taking the time to reflect on a point of view and share it in a considered way.
5 Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding.
3
The Haystack Method:
How to Curate Trends for Fun and Profit
“THE MOST RELIABLE WAY TO ANTICIPATE THE FUTURE
IS THE UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT.”
—JOHN NAISBITT,
Futurist and Author of Megatrends
In 1982, a single book called Megatrends changed the way governments, businesses and people thought about the future.
In the book, author John Naisbitt was one of the first to predict our evolution from an industrial society to an information society, and he did so more than a decade before the Internet. He also predicted the shift from hierarchies to networks and the rise of the global economy.
Despite the book’s unapologetic American-style optimism, most of the 10 major shifts described in the book were so far ahead of their time that when it was first released one reviewer glowingly described it as “the next best thing to a crystal ball.” With over 14 million copies sold worldwide, it is still the single best-selling book about the future published in the last 40 years.
In the decades since the book came out, Naisbitt has been asked the same question in dozens of interviews with the media: how did he develop his ability to predict the future and could others learn to do it?
For his part, Naisbitt believed deeply in the power of observation to understand the present before trying to predict the future (as the opening quote to this chapter illustrates). In interviews, friends and family often described Naisbitt as having a “boundless curiosity about people, cultures and organizations.”
A profile piece in USA Today back in 2006 even noted his penchant for scanning “hundreds of newspapers and magazines, from Scientific American to Tricycle, a Buddhism magazine” as a symbol of his incessant desire to learn.
John Naisbitt was and still is (at the age of 87!) a collector of ideas. His thinking has inspired me for years to think about the world with a similarly broad lens and to develop the process I use for my own trend work: the Haystack Method.
Inside the Haystack Method
It is tempting to describe the art of finding trends with the cliché of finding a “needle in a haystack.” This common visual reference brings to mind the myth of trend spotting that I discounted