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.