Treasure Trove of Insights
Drown in the wisdom of over 235 trend presentations and predictions for this year and beyond.
This month’s One Useful Thing is honestly my favourite one of the entire year, but before I get into it I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has commented, messaged, pre-ordered, and shared the exciting news about my new book, Work Backwards.
Writing a book is a strange thing. It’s a relatively solo exercise inside your own head, until one day it isn’t.
With non-fiction you start with a burning question, and spend days, weeks, months and years swirling it around your head. Occasionally you come up for air, sharing your thoughts with your friends on late-night calls or your partner on epic walks. Finally, you send off long written passages in bursts to your publisher, hoping your intent shines through clearly enough.
Then in the last final gasp before the printing presses start rolling, before anyone has really read it, you do the most vulnerable thing you can possibly think of: you send your precious manuscript to your real-life heroes in the faint hope they can find hours in their days to read it and write some words of endorsement.
In my case, I emailed Work Backwards to a few people I deeply admire. First, I sent it to Seth Godin. Seth is one of the most successful marketers of all time. He’s written dozens of best-selling books, as well as the most viewed marketing blog in the world. He also only writes blurbs for a few books a year, so when we wrote back to me a few days later telling me he’d read it all, I could hardly speak. "This is a rare book: Both profound and useful,” he wrote. “Take your time and savor every page, it will change you for the better."
The next person was Hugh van Cuylenberg. Hugh has spent the last decade working on The Resilience Project, an impressive program that provides evidence-based, practical wellbeing strategies to help others build resilience. He also wrote the book of the same title that’s become Penguin Random House’s biggest-selling local audiobook, listened to and read by hundreds of thousands of people. When Hugh agreed to take a look, I spent days worrying about what he might think. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when he responded that he had to stop reading the book before bed as it provoked too much thinking to sleep. “Absolutely brilliant and life-changing,” he said. “This book will help you take back control of your life.”
Already on cloud nine, the last piece of my endorsement puzzle came from polymath Benjamin Law. From writing books to hosting panels, producing TV shows to being an all-round wonderful human, Ben has been living his version of the future of work for years. So when he wrote that I was “the master of a gentle but firm invitation to reassess our values and relationship to work” I knew I had enough firepower to help this book reach as many people as it needs in order to make the biggest impact. And cue a very relieved, and excited, author.
Don’t forget that if you pre-order two copies of Work Backwards right now you’ll get a bunch of special never-to-be-repeated offers to help you work and live better. All of the details are in the newsletter below.
Now onto this month’s Useful Thing: A treasure trove of insights from hundreds of the smartest companies in the world.
In the very first issue of OUTLET one year ago I shared with you a secret Google Drive containing hundreds of insights from some of the world’s smartest people. Well, guess what? The drive has been updated for 2024 with hundreds more documents, and it’s truly one of the best ways you can possible spend some time.
You can access the full Google Drive of 235 trend reports here.
We don’t normally get access to this amount of information. In fact, no one does. But thanks to the kind work of strategists Amy Daroukakis, Ci En Lee and Iolanda Carvalho, who have painstakingly compiled this list, you now have this information at your fingertips.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, this folder is a crystal ball predicting almost every topic imaginable, like technology, the economy, environment, social media, travel, ideas, talent acquisition, culture, gardening, food, media, drink, employee experience, transport, wellness, Web3, workplaces, digital marketing, real estate, influencers, fashion, customer experience, cyberthreats, retail, grocery, advertising, beauty, creative, events and more.
Some highlights from this year include:
PWC’s 60-page report on emerging trends in APAC real estate
Visa’s Global travel trends
Trendhunter’s 238-page report on what’s about to happen
TikTok’s ‘What’s Next’ report
Accenture’s 2024 ‘Life Trends’
Hours of thought-provoking video presentations
Crypto predictions (if you’re still into that)
Ogilvy’s media trends for the year
Health trends to watch
AI forecasts
And, literally, hundreds more.
Each year it is so fascinating to read through what some of the biggest companies in the world are predicting for the year ahead. Absorb the collective brains of thousands of people level yourself up with knowledge in any area that you desire.
Browse the full list of 2024 presentations here. And if you really have time to dive deep into it, you can also look back at the folders of the 2023, 2022 or 2021 reports as well.
How to use this: If you want to get the most of this wealth of information, this is how I suggest you can best use it:
Go into the Google Drive and scroll through the list until you find a topic or company that interests you (and with over 230 presentations, that shouldn’t be too hard).
Download the presentations you want
Find some quiet time to read through the presentations without any distractions.
Once you’ve done that, upload the PDF into ChatGPT and ask it to summarise it, or use a Chrome app like Ask Your PDF to do the same thing.
Send the summary to your colleagues or people you think would also be interested in it to kick off a conversation about the future together.
This a treasure trove of insights and I hope you get lost in it for days. It’s one of the most useful tools you can have for the year ahead.
See? I told you this month’s OUTLET was going to be a good one.
I’m currently packing my bags up in Mallorca to head to London, Bangkok and then back to Sydney and Canberra for a few weeks later this month. I’ll be jumping straight off the plane and into the recording booth to read the audio book version of Work Backwards to be published same day as the physical book. I have a love/hate relationship with spending hours in a dark studio reading over every single word, but after three books I am now perversely looking forward to it.
I’m also lining up a slew of in-person events in April to celebrate the launch of my book and help explain all the ideas inside there. I’ll share them with you in the next edition of OUTLET.
Until then, yours in usefulness.
Tim