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In addition to the old advice about never going grocery shopping when you’re hungry, you should also make sure you’re not overly caffeinated before doing any kind of shopping. Otherwise, you might end up with a closet full of sad and useless candles and other crap you’ll regret ever owning.
Why do some branded April Fools Day jokes work while others fall flat?
One of the most popular trends from this year’s edition of Non-Obvious was a trend I called RetroTrust – the idea that we trust in brands and experiences from our past. Since I wrote the chapter, I am discovering new examples of the trend in real life all the time. Last week I told the … Read more
Last week one of the inescapable stories in the United States was a controversial video showing a group of Catholic students appearing to clash with Native Americans. They were widely condemned and the video was endlessly dissected in opinion stories shared online and one of the students even went on television to defend himself. Over the course of … Read more
Japanese organizational guru Marie Kondo recently launched a show on Netflix and has inspired millions of people to get rid of the clutter in their lives. Perhaps predictably, now some people are extending that advice to their digital lives too, as the WIRED UK article linked here points out. In this quest to rid ourselves … Read more
The Queen-inspired film Bohemian Rhapsody film was poorly rated by critics, yet became a big box office hit. Earlier this year, the same thing happened to Hugh Jackman’s The Greatest Show musical film about the life of PT Barnum. Why are critics so out of touch with what real people like? And why do we love the … Read more
This was a week filled with more social media stupidity than usual. In a single day I read two disturbing stories that got me thinking about the dangers of our social media addiction. In one, an excited baseball fan posted a picture of his World Series ticket (with the bar code visible) only to an observant thief … Read more
As Washington Redskin’s running back Chris Thompson shares, “Fantasy football, it makes us not human. It’s almost like people think we’re just robots out there, performing for you.” In a sport sometimes described as our modern day gladiator ring due to how often the sport causes long term inury and even death among its participants, Thompson has a … Read more
Last week a small army of cruise ship passengers disrupted a funeral in the tiny Norwegian city of Honningsvåg and took pictures of the mourners. According to The Guardian, Barcelona is crowded with careless tourists who overrun destinations and fail to respect the culture. A political story of a Supreme Court nominee seeming to ignore a handshake and walk away this … Read more
A team of German researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany studied how humans interact with robots. In a paper published in PLOS ONE – they offered the finding that people who were asked to turn a robot off were more likely to leave it on if the robot pleaded with them to “live.” The conclusion … Read more
Non-Obvious is my #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling book about how to see what others miss and anticipate the future.
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of eight books.
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Rohit is the author of 9 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
