Non Obvious Megatrends

I've started off the last 4 years reading Rohit Bhargava's Non Obvious trend reports. They have helped me to frame business decisions and they provide a larger context to small, seemingly unrelated trends. I also love that Rohit covers previous year predictions and grades himself on how well he did. It seems like this may be the last year that Rohit does the yearly report.

I love these yearly reports from Rohit Bhargava. They get my wheels spinning. I learn about products, apps, ideas, and trends I've never considered before. They help me to see things in my own business and projects that can benefit from these trends. They help me pinpoint areas of my client's businesses where they could pivot.

One line of ideas from the Non Obvious books has to do with "retrotrust" and "revivalism." Retrotrust was a trend from the 2019 version of this book. I immediately saw its implication and wrote an article about how a company I used to work for could integrate this into their marketing. Rohit continues this idea with a 2020 trend he calls revivalism. This trend includes the reviving and preserving of the past and the turning back to things we love and know won't disappoint us. In this age of overabundance and choice, the harkening back to a simpler time has tremendous pull. Brands and products can tie into this trend by positioning themselves as the simple and trustworthy solution.

Here are a few other things that stuck out to me from this book:

People are generally more honest on their LinkedIn profiles than on their resumes. LinkedIn is public and resumes can be tailored per company and tend to be private. In this age of overabundance of data, helping people/companies make sense of this data and curate it is a superpower There is a bookstore in Tokyo called Morioka Shoten that only sells one book at a time. Now, that is hyper-curation!