Non-Obvious 2018 Edition. Rohit Bhargava
by listening to yourself speak.”
SIR RICHARD BRANSON, Entrepreneur and Founder of the Virgin Group
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Across decades of research with grade school students, interviewing professional athletes and studying business leaders, renowned Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck has developed an elegant way to describe why some people manage to exceed their potential while others peak early or never achieve that same success.1
According to Dweck, it all depends on your mindset.
People with fixed mindsets believe that their skills and abilities are set. They see themselves as either being good at something or not good at something, and therefore tend to focus their efforts on tasks and in careers where they feel they have a natural ability.
People with growth mindsets believe that success and achievement are the result of hard work and determination. They see their own (and others’) true potential as something to be defined through effort. As a result, they thrive on challenges and often have a passion for learning.
When it came to setbacks, people with a growth mindset are more likely to treat failure “like a parking ticket instead of a car wreck.”2 They’re more resilient, have more self-confidence, are less focused on getting revenge for any perceived wrong, and tend to be happier.
Despite the many benefits of adopting a growth mindset, the sad reality is that as soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges and failure. They become afraid of not being smart. This is a tragedy, because it’s a limitation that they will continue to impose upon themselves into adulthood, sometimes without realizing it.
I have studied thousands of people . . . and it’s breathtaking how many reject an opportunity to learn.
— Carol Dweck (from Mindset)
The first and most important key to becoming a better collector of ideas and thinking more innovatively is the deceptively simple decision not to limit yourself.
What if you were capable of more than just that narrowly defined list of things you believe you are naturally good at? Learning to curate ideas into trends, like playing an instrument or being more observant, is a skill that’s within your grasp to learn and practice—but only if you venture outside of your mental comfort zone and adopt a growth mindset.
Does this mean anyone can transform themselves into a professional flamenco guitarist or a full-time trend forecaster with enough practice? Not necessarily. Aptitude and natural talent still play an important part in succeeding at anything on a professional level.
Yet the past decade of my work with thousands of executives and students at all levels of their careers has proved to me that the skills required for trend curation can be learned and practiced, just as the growth mindset can be taught and embraced. When you learn these skills and combine them with the right mindset, they can inform your own view of the world and power your own future success.
After understanding your mindset, the next step on your path to predicting the future is learning five core habits. To start learning them, let me share a story of the most famous art collector most people had never heard of—until he passed away a few years ago.
The World’s Most Unknown Art Collector
By the time eighty-nine-year-old Herbert Vogel passed away in 2012, the retired New York City postal worker had quietly amassed one of the greatest collections of modern art in the world.
Vogel and his wife, Dorothy, were already local legends in the world of art when Herbert passed away. News stories soon after his death told the story of five large moving vans showing up at the Vogel’s rent-controlled, one-bedroom Manhattan apartment to pick up more than five thousand pieces of art. The Vogel Collection, built over decades, was offered a permanent home as part of the archives and collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
The Vogels had always said the only thing they did was buy and collect art they loved.3
This passion often led them to find new young artists to support before the rest of the world discovered them. The Vogels ultimately became more than collectors. They were tastemakers, and their fabled collection featuring art from hundreds of artists, including pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and post-minimalist Richard Tuttle, was the envy of museums and other private collectors around the world.
The same qualities that drive art patrons like the Vogels to follow their instincts and collect beautiful things are the ones that make great curators of any kind. Museums and the art world are a fitting place to start when learning how to be a curator.
The Rise of “Curationism”
Museum curators organize collections into themes that tell stories. Whether they’re quirky like those told in the Mini Bottle Gallery, or an expansive exhibit covering eighteenth-century pastel portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the goal of curation is always to take individual items and examples and weave them together into a narrative.
Curators add meaning to isolated beautiful things.
I’m inspired by curators—and I’m clearly not alone. The business world has turned toward the longtime practice of curation with such growing frequency that even artists and art critics have noticed.
In 2014, art critic and writer David Balzer published a book with the brilliant title Curationism (a play on “creationism”) to examine how “curating took over the art world and everything else.” His book explores the evolution of the curator as the imparter of value and what the future of curation looks like in a world where so many from outside the art world or without the usual training start to use the principles of the field for their own purposes.
Though the book is an academic read intended mainly for the curatorial circles within which he works, he shares the valuable caution that this rise in curationism can sometimes inspire a “constant cycle of grasping and display,” where we never take the time to understand what the individual pieces mean.
In other words, curation is only valuable if you follow the act of collecting with enough moments of quiet contemplation to truly understand what all of it means.
This combination of collection and contemplation is central to being able to effectively curate ideas and learn to predict the future.
The 5 Habits of Trend Curators
I realize that calling yourself a “curator” of anything can seem like a stretch.
Curator is often a job title applied to someone who has years of expertise in historical studies or the evolution of an industry, but curators today can come from all different types of backgrounds.
Some focus on art and design while others may look at history or anthropology. Some have professional training and degrees while others are driven by passion alone, like Herbert and Dorothy Vogel. No matter their background, every one of them exhibits the same types of habits that help them to become masters at adding meaning to collected items.
Curation doesn’t require you to be an expert or a researcher or an academic. Learning these five habits will help you put the power of curation to work to help you discover better ideas and use them to develop your own observations about the rapidly accelerating present.
The 5 Habits of Trend Curators
Be Curious – always asking why, investing in learning, and improving your knowledge by investigating and asking questions.
Be Observant – learning to notice the small details in stories and life that others may ignore or fail to recognize as significant.
Be Fickle – moving from one idea to the next without becoming fixated or overanalyzing each idea in the moment.
Be