Bhargava - How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future

What can Disney, Bollywood, and The Batkid teach us about how to create celebrity experiences for our audiences? How can a vending-machine inspire world peace? Can being imperfect make your business more marketable? Can a selfie improve ones confidence? When can addiction be a good thing?

The answers to these questions may not be all that obvious. And thats exactly the point.

For the past 4 years I have curated my annual list of non-obvious trends by asking the questions that most trend predictors miss. In this all-new fifth edition, you will discover 15 all-new trends for 2015 across 5 categories including Culture & Consumer Behavior, Marketing & Social Media, Media & Education, Technology & Design and Economics & Entrepreneurship.

Some examples of trends from this year's report include:

The Reluctant Marketer - Why brands are focusing less on traditional marketing and promotion and more on content marketing and customer experience.

Glanceable Content - How companies are leveraging our shrinking attention span to create content designed for rapid consumption

Mood Matching - How the proliferation of sophisticated media, advertising and immersive experiences can be tailored to match consumer needs like never before.

Everyday Stardom - Learn how the growth of personalization leads more consumers to expect everyday interactions to be transformed to celebrity-type experiences.

Selfie Confidence - Why the ability to share a carefully crafted online personality allows people to use social content such as selfies (yes selfies) as a way to build their own confidence.

Mainstream Mindfulness - Mediation, yoga and quiet contemplation have abandonded their incense burning reputations to become powerful tools for individuals and organizations to improve performance, health, and motivation.

Branded Benevolence - Companies increasingly put brand purpose at the center of their businesses to show a deeper commitment to doing good beyond just donating money or getting positive PR.

Reverse Retail - Brands across many varying industries are increasingly investing in high-touch in-store experiences as a way to build brand affinity and educate customers, while seamlessly integrating with online channels to complete actual purchases and fulfill orders.

Experimedia - Content creators are using social experiments and real life interactions to study human behavior in unique new ways and build more realistic and entertaining narratives.

Unperfection - As consumers seek out more personal and human experiences, brands and creators intentionally focus on using personality, quirkiness and intentional imperfections to be more human and desirable.

Predictive Protection - The combination of high privacy concerns with elevated expectations about the role of technology in our lives leads to more intuitive products, services and features to help us live our lives better, safer or more efficiently.

Engineered Addiction - A greater understanding of the behavioral science behind habit formation leads to more designers and engineers intentionally creating addictive experiences that capture consumers time, money and loyalty.

Small Data - As consumers increasingly collect their own data from online activities and the Internet of Things, brand-owned big data becomes less valuable than immediately actionable small data collected and owned by consumers themselves.

Disruptive Distribution - Creators and makers use new models for distribution to disrupt the usual channels, cut out middlemen and build more direct connections with fans and buyers.

For the first time ever, I will also reveal my trend curation process in detail (including plenty of worked examples) and take you behind the scenes to show you the methodology that you can use immediately to see what others miss and learn to predict the future for yourself.

Finally, the detailed appendices in Non-Obvious will take an look back at previous trends, providing an honest self-assessment of what came true, what was a dud, and why.

In the end Non-Obvious is a book that will show you how to think different, curate your ideas and get better at predicting what will be important tomorrow based on learning to better observe patterns in the world today.

I AM NOT A SPEED READER, I AM A SPEED UNDERSTANDER.

ISAAC ASIMOV, Author, Historian and Biochemist

Isaac Asimov was not just a science fiction writer.

In his prolific lifetime, he wrote nearly 500 books on topics ranging from his beloved science fiction series to a two-volume work explaining the collected literature of William Shakespeare. He even wrote a readers guidebook to the Bible.

Even though he was celebrated for his science fiction work, Asimov never defined himself in one category. When asked which his favorite book was, he often joked, the last one Ive written. He wasnt a scientist or a theologian or a literary critic. He was simply a writer with an incredible curiosity for ideas.

Unlike other experts, he knew that the power of his thinking came from his ability to bring disparate bodies of knowledge together and add his own insight. In fact, he used to describe himself as a speed understander, a skill he clearly relied on to help him maintain a grueling schedule of publishing more than 15 books a year at his peak.

What if each of us could become a speed understander like Asimov?

I believe we can.

The simple aim of this book is to teach you how to see the things that others miss. I call that non-obvious thinking, and learning how to do it can change your business and your career.

The context within which Ill talk about this type of thinking is business trends. For better or worse, most of us are fascinated by trends and those who predict them. We see these annual predictions as a glimpse into the future and they capture our imagination.

Theres only one problem most of them are based on guesswork or lazy thinking. They are obvious instead of non-obvious.

This book was inspired by the landslide of obvious ideas we see published today.

In a world where anyone is one button away from being a self-declared expert, learning to think differently is more important than ever. I believe that observing and curating ideas can lead to a unique understanding of why people choose to buy, sell or believe anything.

This book aims to teach you the skills to avoid the obvious and predict trends for yourself.

A great trend is a unique curated observation about the accelerating present.

Great trends are never predictions about the world 20 years from now. Those are most often guesses or wishful thinking. How many trend forecasters do you think predicted the rise of something like Twitter back in 1997? Exactly zero.

Yet this doesnt mean trends are useless. The most powerful trends offer predictions for the short-term future based on observing the present. And knowing the short-term future is more valuable than you may think.

Why Does Trend Curation Matter?

Most of our life decisions happen in the short term, though we may describe them differently. You choose to start a business in the short term. You choose whom to marry in the short term. You change careers from one role to the next, all in the short term.

Long-term decisions start in the short term, so understanding how the world is changing in real time is far more valuable immediately than trying to guess what will happen in the world 20 years from now.