Picking Trends is Easy. Picking Winners is Hard.

Google “trends” and plenty of ideas will pop up. That doesn’t mean they are easy to play.

The world is full of trends. Some are short-lived, like the revival of bell bottom jeans. Some are epoch-defining.

Just check out the headlines everywhere:

“Climate change is real.”

“We’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic.”

“AI will change the world.”

Big, over-arching narratives aren’t hard to discern.

Governments are legislating around them, YouTube channels are explaining them, and the smart money is throwing investment dollars at them.

What is less clear is how you can position yourself to “win” within them.

That is to say, it’s tough to know what to do to better yourself as they play out, whether that’s around your investments, your career opportunities, or your life circumstances.

There are books out there suggesting they can help (e.g., Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit).

But it’s difficult to know the ultimate path of some of these trends.

One problem is you’ll always find parties in opposition to the trend. There will always be vested interests. There will always be doubters.

And people will react differently to what is playing out under their noses — difficulty connecting with the trends or difficulty defining their place in them.

Or in the language that explains many a dysfunctional relationship:

It’s complicated

Take climate change.

Let’s ignore the flat earthers and crazies in denial. A sizeable weight of scientific consensus is telling us the world is in serious jeopardy. The trend is clear.

But how exactly is it going to play out? What will it look like? How can you “win”?

Take those vested interests — influential stakeholders with starkly differing priorities.

You’ve got governments around the world telling us we need to do more to decarbonize. Buy electric cars, recycle your stuff, and turn off the lights when you leave the room. Every little helps:

The world needs to act now and countries around the world need our help (and it’s also for your own good).

Then, you also have oil companies. Exxon Mobil and Chevron have just announced multi-billion-dollar acquisitions of Pioneer Natural Resources and Hess that will make the ‘Big Oil’ sector even bigger:

The world will need plenty of oil for decades and we need to support our country’s energy security (and it’s also for our shareholders’ good).

Climate change is here. We know the direction of travel. We just don’t know how the journey to combat it will look from year to year.

Unknowable trends are everywhere

Then there’s the obesity challenge.

We know the consequences have become a huge drain on the global healthcare system. We know that something has to be done. And we know that Ozempic and other wonder drugs are now expected to ride to the rescue.

We just don’t know how their stories will play out.

Don’t ask the experts what these treatments mean for the bigger picture:

These drugs will ruin the clothing industry. No one will want to buy clothes that won’t fit when they lose all that weight.

or

These drugs will save the clothing industry. Everyone will have to buy new clothes when they lose all that weight.

These are both genuine arguments made by analysts at Wall Street banks. It’s no wonder we get lost in the noise.

Similarly:

AI will destroy all of our jobs and send us all to the poorhouse.

and

AI will enhance our existing jobs and create whole new industries and wealth for us all.

We’ve been here before

I think back to the dot-com bubble.

The era promised so much. The internet was going to change everything. And it most certainly did.

The hype was justified. Such amazing technology. It just wasn’t clear at the time as to how it was going to evolve.

That didn’t stop a lot of us from making bets. After all, there was a clear trend. Or so we assumed.

I remember back then buying shares in an internet company called Medi@Invest. It was brilliant, it was going to change the world, it…went bust.

It chose the same path as Pets.com, Garden.com, Boo.com, eToys.com, and their kind — embarrassing failure.

In hindsight, it was obvious that many of the lauded would go out of business. They weren’t making money. They took on a ton of debt. They were fighting against more established, more relevant companies.

But everyone was at it. All you had to do was build a business with “.com” on the end. Easy.

There were so many dumb ideas back then.

Imagine a startup setting up as an online bookstore, competing head-to-head with Barnes & Noble and Borders, and expecting to survive. Stupid…

Well, I guess Jeff Bezos is a bit smarter than most of us and Amazon.com has moved on from just selling paperbacks…

And here we are — at the start of some phenomenal trends

We’re in exciting times again with ground-breaking technologies gathering traction. AI, crypto, and the metaverse (remember that? Yes, it still exists).

They will change things. They already have to some extent, and will be around in some shape or form for some time. That’s the trend.

How will they play out? Where will you find ways to win?

Not a clue. Ask me again after my guesses have lost me a ton more money.

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