Non-Obvious Megatrends

[NOTE - For an easier reading experience, please see the attached PDF]

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

This is a book about what it takes to see what no one else sees.
This skill is often described as creativity, and we live in a world
that celebrates it. But finding the solution to a particularly tricky
problem or discovering a world changing idea takes more than creativity—
a fact I discovered one fateful day nearly two decades ago
while sitting across the table from a man waiting to be inspired by
anyone but me.
It is 2001 and I have been working in advertising for less than a
year. It’s long enough to understand the hierarchy. There are the creatives—
who have cool titles like “Wizard of Lightbulb Moments”—
and there are the rest of us.
I am not a creative.
We’re sitting in a conference room on the top floor of an office
building overlooking Darling Harbor in Sydney, outfitted with an
enormous table made of Tasmanian oak (as our clients make a point
of telling us). It is an intentionally intimidating setup.
As we present our epic game changing campaign idea, I can’t
help feeling quietly relieved that no one expects me to say anything.
At first the presentation seems to go well. Unfortunately, as our pitch
wraps up our client asks the one question we were not expecting:
“What else you got?”
This is not good.
We had spent two months preparing for this meeting and our
creative team was so convinced it was a winner, that they hadn’t
even brought a backup idea.
Our response to his question was truly terrible. Silence.
I slowly realized that the only person who could remember those
abandoned ideas was the junior member of the team who had taken
notes in all the meetings: me. Summoning my courage, I broke
the silence and spoke up. It was a moment that would change my
career . . . though not perhaps in the way you might imagine.
I did not pull a million-dollar idea out of my head. In fact, the
truth is I don’t remember what I said. But I do remember how I felt.
6 The Art of Non-Obvious Thinking
It was my first taste of what it meant to be on the other side, and I
was hooked. I wanted to have that feeling again.
Unfortunately, creativity still wasn’t my job. And judging from
our failed client encounter, maybe creativity wasn’t even the right
word to describe what our clients actually wanted anyway.
Around that time I found inspiration in the words of an author
who was once asked by novelist Kurt Vonnegut what it felt like to be
“the man who knows everything.”

WHY SPEED READING DOESN’T MATTER

Isaac Asimov has earned that reputation by writing nearly 500 books
in his prolific lifetime. He is most widely known for his groundbreaking
work in science fiction, but he also wrote everything from
an illustrated children’s guide to dinosaurs to a comprehensive
two-volume guide to The Bible.
How could one man have interests and skills so varied that he
could write and publish an average of more than ten books every
year? Asimov credited his creative thinking to his legendary appetite
for reading and learning about everything he could from a
young age.
“I am not a speed reader,” he once said. “I am a speed understander.”
What if you could be a speed understander too?
It’s hard to imagine following Asimov’s recipe for understanding
in today’s world. We are inundated by content, and most of it is not
good. It has become nearly impossible to separate the bullshit from
the believable. Digital tools have made it easy for everyone to share
ideas, even if they are one-dimensional or idiotic. Yet bullshit, no
matter how well packaged and easily distributed, remains bullshit.
To face this landslide of bad content, we are increasingly relying
on a combination of algorithms and one-dimensional opinions
shared on social media to help us filter the noise. And we’ve
pioneered new methods of skimming out of sheer desperation. We
watch television at accelerated speed, use speed-reading apps that
flash a single word at a time, and turn to productivity gurus specializing
in “time hacking.”
None of these solutions work for long.
The problem is that expecting to get smarter from processing
content faster is a bit like entering a speed-eating contest to enjoy
a good meal. Eating 26 hot dogs in 60 seconds might satisfy your
hunger, but you’re likely to feel sick afterwards.
You can’t understand the world better simply by reading about it
as much as possible. You do so by being intentional about what you
pay attention to in the first place. What if you could become a lifelong
learner, curious about the world and able to see, understand,
and expect things others miss? What if you could use that skill to
understand patterns, spot intersections and see around the corner
to develop an observation of what the future might hold? And what
if, once you put all the pieces together, you could actually learn to
predict the future?
You can, and the ambitious aim of this book is to teach you how
to do it. I call my approach Non-Obvious
Thinking, and it can change
your life. It changed mine, as I realized years ago after spending a
memorable afternoon in Norway surrounded by 50,000 bottles of
alcohol that I couldn’t drink.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM A NORWEGIAN
BILLIONAIRE

Christian Ringnes is one of the richest men in Scandinavia. A flamboyant
businessman and art collector, he made his fortune in real
estate and was the driving force and financier behind the critically
acclaimed Ekeberg Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway. Yet his legacy
may come from a far quirkier accomplishment: amassing one of
the largest independent collections of miniature liquor bottles
in the world.
His decades-long
obsession eventually ran into an insurmountable
opponent: his wife, Denise. Tired of the clutter, she
offered him an ultimatum: Find something to do with the more
than 52,000 bottles he had amassed or start selling them. Like any
other avid collector, Ringnes couldn’t bear the thought of parting
with his beloved bottles, so he did exactly what you might expect a
Norwegian real estate tycoon to do: he commissioned a museum
for his bottles.
Today his Mini Bottle Gallery is one of the world’s top weird
museum destinations, routinely featured in offbeat travel guides.
When I took a tour of the gallery, I was fascinated by how it was
organized. Every room featured bottles grouped into quirky themes
ranging from a “Room of Sin” inspired by a brothel to a “Horror
Room” featuring liquor bottles with trapped objects such as mice or
worms floating inside.
More important, like other well-crafted
museum experiences,
the Mini Bottle Gallery is carefully curated. Only about 20 percent
of Ringnes’ collection is on display at any one time. This thoughtful
selection creates meaning for the entire gallery because each room
tells a story, and those stories bring the experience to life.
As I walked out of the museum that evening, I realized just how
important this idea of curation might be to my own work. What if
the secret to having better ideas that clients loved was to get better
at curating them before I needed them?

HOW I BECAME AN IDEA CURATOR

Back in the middle of 2005, I was part of a team tasked with starting
what would become one of the largest and most successful social
media teams in the world. At that time, social media basically meant
blogging, so our services involved helping large brands find ways to
engage bloggers directly.
Writing a blog seemed easy, so I decided to start one myself. My
first few posts came easily, but then I ran out of ideas.
How was I going to keep my hastily created blog constantly
updated with new stories when I already had a full-time
day job? I
needed a better method for collecting ideas.
I started seeking ideas everywhere. At first, I gathered them by
emailing links of stories to myself. I scribbled possible blog topics
on scraps of paper. I saved quotes from books and ripped pages out
of magazines. As my collection of potential topics grew, I started
saving them in a simple yellow folder with Ideas scrawled on the tab.
9
Soon worn from use, it was held together at its badly ripped seam by
a tired piece of duct tape.
It worked, and I now had plenty of inspiration for what to write
about. I did that religiously for four years, at times posting a new
article every day.
During that time, I wrote more than a thousand articles and built
a readership of hundreds of thousands of people. The blog won several
awards, helped grow my network, and eventually helped me
land a deal with McGraw-Hill
to publish my first book, Personality
Not Included, in 2008.
Two years later, I did something that would shape the next decade
of my life.

THE BIRTH OF THE NON-OBVIOUS
TREND REPORT

Near the end of 2010, I was reading article after article about trends
for the coming year. Almost all of them were lazy, uninformed, or
self-serving
declarations of the obvious. According to one, the
hottest trend of the year would be the iPhone 4. Another article
suggested that “more people would express themselves on social
media.” Yet another predicted that 2011 would be the Year of Drones.
Not surprisingly, that one was written by the CEO of a company that
made drones.
These weren’t trends—they were profoundly obvious observations
of the world.
At best they were wishful thinking, and at worst they were veiled
pitches for products or services hoping to profit from being considered
trendy. In a frustrated bid to do better, I published my own list
of 15 trends and called it the Non-Obvious
Trend Report, named as a
not-so-
subtle
criticism of all the blatantly obvious trend predictions
I had read.
The report went viral as hundreds of thousands of people read
and shared it.
Over the next five years, what started as a 20 page PowerPoint
presentation shared online evolved into a robust annual trend
report with hundreds of pages of research, interviews, panels and
eventually, in 2015, a bestselling print edition of the book you now
hold in your hands.
Along the way, I left my job at Ogilvy, became an entrepreneur,
spoke on some of the biggest stages in the world and published a
new annual edition of the book with updated trends every January.
Now, ten years and nine editions later, my library of non-obvious
trends has grown to more than a hundred predictions. The books
have been translated into eight languages, earned nine prestigious
international book awards, and reached well over a million readers.
They also have led people to label me with a title I always struggled
to embrace: a futurist.

WHY I AM A RELUCTANT FUTURIST

I am inspired by futurists who look at the world today and anticipate
what will come. Reading The Next 100 Years by leading futurist
George Friedman, for example, is like being engrossed in both a wonderful
work of science fiction and a prescient description of potential
reality. The year 2060 indeed might begin the “Golden Decade,” as he
predicts. That is how futurists think.
In comparison, my team and I research trends to help brands
and leaders understand the accelerating present and act on that
knowledge today. That’s why “futurist” always felt like an overstatement
to me.
In past interviews, I have described myself instead as a “near futurist.”
My lens typically focuses on trends that are affecting our behavior
or beliefs right now. However, that doesn’t mean my annual trend
predictions expire; instead, if well predicted, they become more obvious
over time.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

After a decade of making predictions, my team and I have seen
some trends evolve into broader cultural or behavioral shifts while
others have faded in significance.
In this tenth anniversary edition of Non-Obvious,
we will take a
look at the past decade of research and incorporate the most significant
trends and stories while offering a broader context around the
urgent need for more non-obvious
thinkers in the world.
In Part 1, you will discover the five key mindsets required for
being a non-obvious
thinker, followed by a detailed look at my
signature
Haystack Method for curating trends and techniques for
putting insights into action.
Part 2 of the book features predictions of ten powerful megatrends
that will shape the coming decade, along with implications for
culture, business, careers, and humanity. Each chapter also explores
the potential implications each of the megatrends are likely to have
in our world.
Finally, Part 3 includes a candid review of every previously predicted
trend from the past nine years, along with a curated rating of
how each one fared over time and the fascinating backstory of how
the report itself evolved from year to year.
As you’ll learn throughout this book, the benefits of learning to
be a non-obvious
thinker go far beyond just being able to identify
trends. Seeing the non-obvious
makes you more open minded to
change and can help you disrupt instead of getting disrupted.
Non-obvious
thinking can make you the most creative person
in any room, no matter what your business card says and help solve
your biggest problems. Most importantly, non-obvious
thinking
can help you anticipate, predict and win the future.
Ultimately the biggest lesson may be that you don’t need to
be a speed reader to win the future. Being a speed understander is
a far worthier aspiration. It’s my hope that this book will help you
get there.