Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Page 3

  How to Think Different About Trends

  Now that we have examined the many myths and reasons for failure, let’s focus on what makes a non-obvious trend:

  Non-obvious trends focus on the intersection of multiple industries, behaviors, and beliefs.

  Over the next two chapters, you’ll learn the step-by-step technique that can help you think differently about trends and escape the trap of lazy thinking that leads to obvious ideas. In doing that, you’ll immediately find yourself having more insights than your peers around you and seeing the connections between industries and stories in a way that most people don’t.

  The key to the method you’re about to learn is a willingness to go outside your usual sources of information and open your mind to unconventional ways of thinking and brainstorming. As a result, you’ll become better at spotting the connections between the things you read, what you see, and the conversations you have.

  There’s magic to be found in thinking like a trend curator. Let’s talk about how to find it.

  02

  The Curator’s Mindset:

  Learning the 5 Essential Habits

  of Trend Curators

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  “You never learn anything 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.[4]

  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.”[5] 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.[6]

  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 Thoughtful

  Taking time to develop a meaningful point of view and considering alternative viewpoints without bias.

  Be Elegant

  Seeking beautiful ways to describe ideas that bring together disparate concepts in a simple and understandable way.

  How to Be Curious

  Ask questions about how things work, and approach unfamiliar situations and/or topics with a sense of wonder.

  Bjarni Herjulfsson could have been one of the most famous explorers in the history of the world.

  Instead, his life has become a cautionary tale about the historic consequences of lacking curiosity. In the year AD 986, he set off on a voyage from Norway with a crew to find Greenland. Blown off course by a storm, his ship became the first European vessel in recorded history to see North America.

  Despite his crew pleading to stop and explore, Herjulfsson refused and guided his ship back on course to eventually find Greenland. Years later, he told this tale to a friend named Leif Erikson, who became inspired, purchased Herjulfsson’s ship, and took the journey for himself. Erikson is now widely remembered as the first European to land in North America—nearly five hundred years before Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas and “discovered” America.[7]

  Herjulfsson, on the other hand, has been mostly forgotten and his story illustrates exactly why curiosity matters: it’s a prerequisite to discovery. Humans are naturally curious. The challenge is to continually find ways to allow yourself to explore your curiosity without it becoming an ongoing distraction.

  When noted chef and food pioneer Ferran Adrià was once asked what he likes to have for breakfast, his reply was simple: “I like to eat a different fruit every day of the month.” Imagine if you could do that with ideas. Part of being curious is wanting to consume stories, ideas, and experiences to earn greater knowledge of the world, even if that knowledge doesn’t seem immediately useful.

  3 Ways to Be More Curious Today

  Consume “Brainful Media.” Sadly, we are surrounded with “brainless media,” including reality shows featuring unlikeable people doing unlikeable things (sometimes on islands, sometimes in our backyards). While they can be addictively entertaining, brainless media encourages vegetation instead of curiosity. Curiosity is fueled by consuming media that makes you think, such as a short documentary film or an inspirational seventeen-minute talk from TED.com

  Empathize with Magazines. One of my favorite ways to see the world through someone else’s eyes is buying niche magazines to learn about unfamiliar topics. Simply walking into the magazine section of a bookstore offers plenty of options. For example, Modern Farmer, Model Railroader, and House Beautiful are three vastly different magazines. Flipping through the stories, advertisements, and imagery in each will do more to take you outside of your own world than almost any other quick-and-easy ten-minute activity.

  Ask Bigger Questions. A few years ago, I was invited to deliver a talk at an event for the home interior paint industry. It’s an industry I know very little about and so it was tempting to show up, deliver my keynote, and then leave. Instead, I stayed and walked around the exhibit hall asking questions. In less than thirty minutes I learned about how paint is mixed and what additives are typically used. I heard about the industry debate between all-plastic cans versus steel and the rise of computerized color-matching systems. Thanks to that small investment of time on my part, the talk I gave was far more relevant.

  Be Curious: What to Read

  Historical Fiction. Every great piece of historical fiction was inspired by a writer who found a story from the past that was worth sharing with the world. By reading books such as Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City (about murder at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair) or Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary), you can give yourself a wonderful gateway to start thinking about the world in unexpected ways.

  Curated Compilations. There are many books that bring together real-life stories or essays to help you think about new and interesting topics. A collection of shorter topics and stories is sometimes far easier to use for engaging your curiosity than a longer book. For example, the This Will Make You Smarter series edited by John Brockman or any book by You Are Not So Smart podcast host and psychology buff David McRaney are perfect, bite-sized ways to inspire your curiosity without requiring a huge time investment.

  How to Be Observant

  Pay attention to the world, and train yourself to notice the details that others miss.

  I was invited not long ago to a formal dinner connected to an event in New York. The venue was a beautiful restaurant, and after our meal the waiter came around to take our dessert orders from one of two set menu options. Less than ten minutes later, a team of six people, not including our waiter, came and delivered all the desserts to our large table of thirty people, getting each order perfectly right without saying a word to anyone.

  As they delivered the desserts, I started to wonder how that one waiter who took our orders had managed to relay all those choices perfectly to a team of six in such a short time.

  By observing the wait staff for a moment, I quickly figured out the simple trick our head waiter had used. If you had picked dessert option one, he had placed a dessert spoon on the table above your plate. If you picked option two, he placed the spoon to the right of your plate.

  When the team of food runners came to the table, all they needed was the “code” to decipher the spoon positioning and they could deliver the desserts to the right people with ease and accuracy.

  Perhaps you already knew that spoon trick, but imagine if you didn’t. Simply observing it gives you a glimpse into the little processes that we rarely pay attention to that keep the world moving along. Now, you might be thinking, Who cares how waiters deliver dessert?

  Of course, understanding how dessert is delivered will hardly change your life, but imagine that moment multiplied out to a thousand different situations. Observing details can lead to understanding something insignificant, but it can also lead to your next big business idea.

  Learning to be more observant isn’t just about seeing the big things. Instead, it’s about training yourself to pay more attention to the little things. What can you see about a situation that other people miss? What can the details you’re noticing teach you about people, processes, and companies that you didn’t know before?

  This is the power of making observation a habit.

  3 Ways to Be More Observant

  Explain the World to Children. If you’re fortunate to have children in your life, one of the best ways to hone your skills of observation is to explain the world around you to them. For example, when one of my kids asked me recently why construction vehicles and traffic signs are orange but cars that most people drive aren’t, it forced me to think about something I would otherwise have easily ignored, even if I didn’t have the perfect answer to the question.[8]

  Watch Processes in Action. Many interactions in life, from how the coffee shop makes your latte to who gets an upgrade on a flight are controlled by a scripted process. Next time you engage with one of these processes, pay attention to the details. What does a
typical interaction look like? How does it differ from person to person? Learning not to ignore these common processes in everyday life is great training for being more observational in situations where it really matters.

  Don’t Be Observationally Lazy. Aside from being really good at capturing our attention, our devices can keep us from seeing the world around us. Rather than switching to autopilot to navigate daily tasks like walking down the street or buying groceries while trying to avoid any or all eye contact, train yourself to put your phone down, see the world, and maybe even have a conversation.

  Be 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.