Non-Obvious 2017 Edition. Rohit Bhargava
Part IV is a new look at 105 previously predicted trends from the past six years along with an honest assessment and rating for how each one performed over time since it was originally predicted.
You can choose to read this book in the order it was published or you can skip back and forth between trends and techniques. Whether you choose to focus on my predictions for 2017 and how to apply them, or learning the techniques of trend curation and Non-Obvious thinking for yourself, this book can be read in short bursts or all at once.
Like Asimov, you don’t need to be a speed reader.
Being a speed understander, however, is a worthy aspiration. It is my hope that this book will help you get there.
1
The Norwegian Billionaire:
Why Most Trend Predictions Are Spectacularly Useless
In 1996 Christian Ringnes was a billionaire with the ultimate first-world problem – he was running out of space.
As one of the richest men in Norway, Ringnes is well known as a flamboyant businessman and art collector whose family started the country’s largest brewery more than a hundred years ago. In his hometown of Oslo, Ringnes owns several restaurants and museums, and donated more than $70 million for the creation of a large sculpture and cultural park, which opened in 2013.
In his heart, Ringnes is a collector. Over decades he has built one of the largest private collections of art in the world. Yet his real legacy may come from something far more unique: his lifelong obsession with collecting mini liquor bottles.
This fixation on mini liquor bottles began for Ringnes at the age of seven when he received an unusual gift from his father: a half-empty miniature liquor bottle. It was this afterthought of a gift that led him on a path towards amassing what is recognized today as the largest independent mini-bottle collection in the world with over 52,000 miniature liquor bottles.
Unfortunately, his decades-long obsession eventually ran into an insurmountable opponent—his late wife, Denise.
As the now legendary story goes, Denise wasn’t too happy with the disorganization of having all these bottles around the house. After years of frustration, she offered him an ultimatum: either find something to do with all those bottles or start selling them.
Like any avid collector, Ringnes couldn’t bear the thought of selling them, so he created a perfectly obvious solution based on his wealth and personality.
He commissioned a museum.
“To Collect Is Human”
Today the Mini Bottle Gallery in downtown Oslo is one of the world’s top quirky museum destinations, routinely featured in irreverent travel guides and global lists of must-see Scandinavian tourist attractions. Beyond providing a place for Ringnes to put all of his mini bottles, the gallery is also a popular event venue with an in-house restaurant.
It was this event space and restaurant that offered me my first personal introduction to Ringnes and his story. I was in Oslo for an event and the conference team had organized a tour and dinner at the Mini Bottle Gallery.
I have 52,500 different miniature bottles in a museum in Oslo. They’re completely useless. But men, we like collecting. We like having things. That’s human. Once you get fascinated by something, you want it and then you start collecting.
—Christian Ringnes
(From interview in Arterritory.com magazine)
It lived up to its quirky reputation.
The entrance to the museum was a bottle shaped hallway leading into an open lobby with a champagne waterfall. As you moved from room to room, each featured its own composed soundtrack, customized lighting and unique smells.
Only steps into the tour, it was clear the gallery was more than just stacks of bottles lined along the walls of a display case in random fashion. Like all great museum experiences, the rooms of the Mini Bottle Gallery had been carefully curated.
The mini bottles were grouped into intriguing themes ranging from a brothel themed Room of Sin with mini-bottles from the Dutch Red Light District, to a Horror Room featuring liquor bottles with trapped objects floating inside like mice and worms.
There was a Jungle Room, a Room of Famous Persons, and rooms themed around sports, fruits, birds, circus performers and the occult. There was even an entire room featuring the iconic porcelain series of the Delft Blue KLM houses, a series of tiny Dutch rowhouse-shaped liquor bottles given away to passengers by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.
Across all these rooms, the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display at any one time. The rest are stored in a bottle vault below the museum and available for display when needed.
Adding Meaning to Noise
The Mini Bottle Gallery only displays about 20% of Ringnes’ full collection at any time, and carefully keeps the rest in storage. This thoughtful curation makes the experience of seeing them valuable.
If you consider the amount of media any of us is exposed to on an average day, the quest to find meaning amongst the noise is a familiar challenge. Navigating information overload requires the same discipline as deciding what bottles to put on display so those that visitors see can tell a better story.
Curation is the ultimate method of transforming noise into meaning.
Without curation, the meaning would be lost and the experience incomprehensible.
An Accidental Trend Curator
It was only on my flight home from Oslo after that event that I realized how important curation had become for my own work.
Just a few months earlier I had published the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report, inspired by an idea to publish an article from the many ideas I had collected over the past year but never written about.
What I was already doing without realizing it was collecting intriguing ideas and saving them in perhaps the most disorganized way possible—by writing them down randomly, printing them out or ripping them out of magazines and keeping them in a folder on my desk.
In producing that first report, my ambition became to describe patterns in the stories I had collected that went beyond the typical obvious observations I was always reading online. My goal was to find and develop insights that others either hadn’t yet noticed or that were not getting the attention they warranted.
To get a different output, sometimes you need a different input.
On that flight home from Norway, I realized that my accidental method for getting different input—collecting ideas for a year and waiting months before analyzing them—could actually be the very thing that would set my insights apart and make them truly Non-Obvious.
The Non-Obvious Trend Report (my annual list of 15 trends) was born from this desire to share under appreciated ideas and connect them together into predictions about the future.
Science’s Dirty Little Secret
Now, if you happen to be an analytical person, this process will hardly seem rigorous enough to be believable. How can collecting ideas and waiting possibly be a recipe for developing genuine insights? What about firsthand research? What about trend panels and using a global army of spotters? What about the science?
Well, it turns out science has a forgotten side that has little to do with devising experiments and far more to do with training your powers of observation.
When you think about the discipline that goes into scientific research and the many years of study that lead to a PhD, it is easy to see research as a task only performed by robot-like perfectionists. The truth of scientific research, just