Non-Obvious 2018 Edition. Rohit Bhargava
language and understand that less can mean more.
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. To illustrate how, here’s the process I used to name my trends in previous reports.
3 Ways to Think More Elegantly
Start with the Obvious. One of the most popular 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 see something they were already familiar with in a new way. Selfies are often criticized as demonstrations of narcissism, but the trend also suggested the idea that selfies might contribute to helping people to grow their self-esteem.
Keep It Short. One thing you’ll notice if you look back on any of the previous years’ trends (including this year) is that the title for 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.
Use Poetic Principles. Poets use metaphors and imagery instead of obvious language. In Chapter 3 you’ll get an inside look at how I use techniques borrowed from poetry as part of the naming process I use every year for trends. A quick scan of past trends will also illustrate how I’ve used these principles to describe trends like “Preserved Past” or “Lovable Unperfection.”
Be Elegant: What to Read
Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman. This book, written by an MIT physicist and one of my favorites, creatively 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’ll introduce you to the power of poetic writing while also offering the most elegant description of the nature of time that you’ll ever read.
Any Book by Dr. Seuss. This may seem like an odd suggestion, but Dr. Seuss had a great talent for sharing big ideas with simplicity and elegance. You probably already know some of his brilliance: “Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.” Reading his work, though, will remind you of the power of finding just the right words while inspiring you to do more with less.
Why These 5 Habits?
Do these five habits for helping you to learn the art of curating ideas seem a bit surprising? The fact is, the process of how I came to these five involved an 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. I tested the effectiveness and resonance of these habits by teaching them to my students at Georgetown University and professionals in private workshops.
Ultimately, I selected the five habits presented here because they were the most helpful, descriptive, easy to learn, and effective once you learn to put them into action.
As a recap before we get started with a step-by-step approach to curating trends, let’s do a review:
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The Haystack Method:
How to Curate Trends for
Fun and Profit
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“The most reliable way to anticipate the future
is to understand the present.”
JOHN NAISBITT, Futurist and Author of Megatrends
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In 1982, a book called Megatrends changed the way governments, businesses, and people thought about the future.
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 advent of 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 ten major shifts described in Megatrends 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 more than 14 million copies sold worldwide, it’s still the single bestselling book about the future published in the last forty years.
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,” even noting that he had a habit of scanning “hundreds of newspapers and magazines, from Scientific American to Tricycle, a Buddhism magazine” in search of new ideas.1
John Naisbitt was and still is (at a spry eighty-eight!) a collector of ideas. For years, his ideology has inspired me to think about the world with a similarly broad lens and has helped me to develop the process I use for my own trend work, which I call the Haystack Method.
Inside the Haystack Method
It’s 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 in Chapter 1. Uncovering trends hardly ever involves them sitting in plain sight waiting for us to spot them.
The Haystack Method describes a process where you first focus on gathering stories and ideas (the hay) and then use them to define a trend (the needle), which gives meaning to them all collectively.
In this method, the work comes from assembling the information and curating it into groupings that make sense. The needle is the insight you apply to this collection of information to describe what it means—and to curate information and stories into a definable trend.
While that describes the method with metaphors, to learn how to do it for yourself we need to go deeper. Starting with the story of why I created the Haystack Method in the first place.
Why I Started Curating Ideas
The Haystick Method was born out of frustration.
In 2004, I was part of a team that was starting one of the first social media–focused practices within a large marketing agency. The idea was that we would help big companies figure out how to use this new platform as a part of their marketing efforts.
The aim of our team was to help brands work with influential bloggers, because in 2004 (prior to Facebook and Twitter) “social media” mainly referred to blogging. There was only one problem with this well-intentioned plan—none of us knew very much about blogging.
So we did the only thing that seemed logical to do: each of us started blogging.
In June of that year I started my “Influential Marketing Blog” with an aim to write about marketing, public relations, and advertising strategy. My first post was on the dull topic of optimal screen size for web designers. Within a few days I ran into my first challenge: I had no plan for what to write about next.
How was I going to keep this hastily created blog current with new ideas and stories when I already had a full-time day job that wasn’t meant to involve spending time writing a blog? I realized I had to become more disciplined about how I collected ideas.
At