Non-Obvious 2018 Edition. Rohit Bhargava
Observant: What to Read
What Every Body Is Saying, by Joe Navarro. If you need to learn the art of interpreting body language or detecting lies, a former FBI agent like Joe Navarro is probably the ideal teacher. In this bestselling book from 2008, Navarro shares some of his best lessons on how to spot “tells” in body language and use them to interpret human behavior. His work on situational awareness and teaching people how to be more observant to assess people and situations for danger and comfort is a book that should be on your reading list no matter what you do. It also happens to be a perfect supporting book to teach you how to be more observant.
How to Be Fickle
Being fickle means capturing ideas without needing to fully understand or analyze them in that same moment.
People often cast the idea of being fickle as a bad thing. When we hear the word, we tend to think of all the negative situations where we abandon people or ideas too quickly, but there is an upside to learning how to be purposefully fickle.
On the surface, this may seem counterintuitive. After all, why wouldn’t you take the time to analyze a great idea and develop a point of view? There are certainly many situations when you do this already.
But you probably never do the opposite. A key element of becoming an idea curator is saving ideas for later digestion. As you will see in Chapter 3, where I share my specific methods for curating trends, this idea of saving an idea so I can return to it later when it may have more value is a very fundamental part of the method I use for trend curation.
Often the connection between ideas will only come from the discipline of setting them aside and choosing to analyze them later, when you have more stories and added perspective to see the connections. Being fickle isn’t about avoiding thought—it’s about freeing yourself from the pressure to recognize connections immediately and making it easier to come back to an idea later for analysis.
3 Ways to Be More Fickle
Save Ideas Offline. There are countless digital productivity tools, such as Evernote, but they can be hard to manage and navigate when you need them. Instead, I routinely print articles, rip stories out of magazines, and put them all into a single trend folder that sits on my desk. Saving ideas offline allows me to physically spread them out later to analyze more easily.
Use a Timer. To avoid the temptation to overanalyze an idea in the moment, set a timer as a reminder to go back. It will help you to clear your mind in the interim. The other benefit of using a timer is that it can force you to evaluate things more quickly and just focus on the big picture.
Take Notes with a Sharpie. I mark the many articles and stories I find throughout the year with a few words to remind me of the theme of the article and story. I use a Sharpie marker because the thicker lettering stands out and encourages me subtly to write less. This same trick can help you to make only the most useful observations in the moment and save any others for later.
Be Fickle: What to Read
The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. Maeda is a master of design and technology, and his advice has guided many companies and entrepreneurs toward building more amazing products. In this short book, he shares some essential advice for learning to see the world like a designer and how to reduce the noise in order to see and think more clearly.
How to Make Sense of Any Mess, by Abby Covert. I have read many books on the art of organizing information, but this one, with its smart reasoning and simplified approach, is one of my favorites. The author is an Information Architect who goes by the pseudonym “Abby the IA” and shares methods based on more than ten years of teaching experience that are worth adopting and sharing with your entire team.
How to Be Thoughtful
Being thoughtful means taking the time to reflect on a point of view and share it in a considered way.
In 2014, after ten years of writing my business and marketing blog, I decided to stop allowing comments. For some readers, this seemed counter to one of the fundamental principles of blogging, which is to create a dialogue.
The reason I stopped was simple. I had noticed a steady decline in the quality of comments. What was once a robust discussion involving thoughtfully worded responses had devolved into a combination of thumbs-up–style comments and spam.
Thanks to anonymous commenting and the ease of sharing knee-jerk responses, comments had lost their thoughtfulness—and people were starting to notice. Thus, I turned off the comments.
The web is filled with this type of “conversation.” Angry, biased, half-thought-out responses to articles, people, or media. Being thoughtful is harder to do when the priority is to share a response in real time. Yet the people who are routinely thoughtful are the ones who gain and keep respect. They add value instead of noise... and you can be one of them.
3 Ways to Be More Thoughtful
Wait a Moment. The beauty and challenge of the Internet is that it occurs in real time. It’s easy to think that if you can’t be the first person to comment on something, your thoughts are too late. That’s rarely true. “Real time” shouldn’t mean sharing a comment from the top of your head within seconds. Take your time before writing a comment or sharing a link and consider what you’re about to say—and whether you’d still be proud to say it twenty-four hours from now.
Write and then Rewrite. When it comes to being thoughtful with writing, all of the most talented writers take time to rewrite their thinking instead of sharing the first thing that they write down. The process of rewriting can seem like a big-time commitment, but the fastest form of writing is dialogue—so when in doubt, write it like you would say it.
Embrace the Pauses. As a speaker, becoming comfortable with silence took me years to master. It’s not an easy thing to do. Yet when you can use pauses effectively, you can emphasize the things you really want people to hear and give yourself time to craft the perfect thing to say.
Be Thoughtful: What to Read
Brain Pickings, by Maria Popova. Popova describes herself as an “interestingness hunter-gatherer,” and she has one of the most popular independently run blogs in the world. Every week she publishes articles combining lessons from literature, art, and history on wide-ranging topics like creative leadership and the gift of friendship. The way she presents her thoughts is a perfect aspirational example of how to publish something thoughtful week after week.
How to Be Elegant
Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding.
Jeff Karp is a scientist inspired by elegance . . . and jellyfish.
As an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Karp’s research focuses on using bio-inspiration—inspiration from nature—to develop new solutions for all types of medical challenges. His self-named Karp Lab has developed innovations such as a device inspired by jellyfish tentacles to capture circulating tumor cells in cancer patients and better surgical staples inspired by porcupine quills.
Nature is filled with elegant solutions, from the way that forest fires spread the seeds of certain plants to the way termites build porous structures with built-in heating and cooling.
I believe it’s this idea of simplicity that’s fundamental to developing elegant ideas. As Albert Einstein famously said, “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
A good example of things described beautifully is in what talented poets do. Great poetry has simplicity, emotion, and beauty because superfluous