Non-Obvious 2017 Edition. Rohit Bhargava

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      Why I Started Curating Ideas

      The Haystick Method was born from frustration.

      In 2004, I was part of a team that was starting one of the first social media–focused practices within a large marketing agency. The idea was that we would help big companies figure out how to use social media.

      Back then “social media” mainly referred to blogging since it was before Facebook and Twitter. The real aim of our team was to help brands work with influential bloggers. There was only one problem with this well-intentioned plan—none of us knew very much about blogging.

      So, we all did the only thing that seemed logical to do: each of us started blogging for ourselves.

      In June of that year I started my “Influential Marketing Blog” with an aim to write about marketing, public relations and advertising strategy. My first post was on the dull topic of optimal screen size for web designers. Within a few days I ran into my first challenge: I had no plan for what to write about next.

      How was I going to keep this hastily created blog current with new ideas and stories when I already had a full time day job that didn’t officially involve spending time writing a blog?

      I realized I had to become more disciplined about how I collected ideas.

      At first my aim was just to find ideas for blog posts, scratched into a notebook or emailed to myself. Then, I included ideas from the many brainstorms I was involved in on a daily basis. Pretty soon I was saving quotes from books, ripping pages out of magazines and generating plenty of blog posts (and client ideas!) based on the ideas I had collected.

      These first four years of blogging led to my first book deal with McGraw-Hill. Several years later, the desire to write a blog post about trends based on ideas I had collected across the year led me to publish the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report in 2011.

      My point in sharing this story is to illustrate how collecting ideas helped me to get better at saving and sharing ideas that people cared about. I became a collector of ideas—which describes perfectly the first step in the Haystack Method.

      Step 1—Gathering

      Gathering is the disciplined act of collecting stories and ideas from any interaction you have with people or experiences.

      Do you read the same sources of media religiously every day? Or do you skim Twitter occasionally and sometimes follow the links to continue reading? Regardless of your media consumption, chances are you encounter plenty of interesting stories or ideas. The real question is, do you save them?

      The key to gathering ideas is making a habit of saving interesting things in a way that allows you to find and explore them later.

      My method involves always carrying a small Moleskine notebook in my pocket and keeping a folder on my desk to save media clippings and printouts. By the time you read these words, that folder on my desk has changed color and probably already says “2018 Trends” on the outside of it.

      In my process, I start the clock every January and complete it each December for my annual Non-Obvious Trend Report (Part II of this book). Thanks to this deliverable, I have a clear starting and ending point for each new round of ideas that I collect.

      You don’t need to follow as rigid of a calendar timetable, but it is valuable to set yourself a specific time when you can go back and reflect on what you have gathered to uncover the bigger insights (a point we will explore in subsequent steps).

      As you first read this list of sources, they might seem, well, obvious. It is rarely the sources of information themselves that will lead you toward a perfectly packaged idea or trend. Rather, mastering the art of gathering valuable ideas means training yourself to uncover interesting ideas across multiple sources and become diligent about collecting them.

      TIPS & TRICKS: How To Gather Ideas

      Step 2—Aggregating

      Aggregating involves taking individual ideas and disconnected thoughts and grouping them together based on bigger themes.

      Once you have been diligently gathering ideas, the next step is to choose a time to go and combine the early results of your observation СКАЧАТЬ