
Stop Chasing Trends & Start Understanding Them

Great trends reflect a moment in time, but that moment is never fleeting, and the basic idea is more elevated. Good trends always focus on the shift in an underlying human behavior or belief. They don’t describe a single interesting story or a hot new product or industry.
Rohit Bhargava • Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future (Non-Obvious Trends Series)

More significant than what trends represent on their own and in the moment is what they collectively symbolize. Ours is a period of increasing noise. Everything is bleeding into everything around it. All trends, large and small, now suggest a new cultural mood—but only until the next Vaseline-smeared obsession comes along.
Jason Parham Culture • The Age of Everything Culture Is Here
Once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend… So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.
David Perell • Peter Thiel’s Religion
(In The Death of Trends, Vox's Terry) Nguyen is examining a more abstract consequence of this rapid acceleration, which is that it saps trends of their subcultural context, reducing them to status symbols that represent status itself, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading to more breadcrumbs. Her piece is focused on fashion trends, or aesthetic ... See more
Haley Nahman • #100: New idea trending
