How to Spot Trends Before Everyone Else
You have to accept reality as it is
One trait that separates the Big Winners in life from the also-rans and wannabes is the ability to see things As They Really Are.
No emotion, no ideology, no what-ifs. Just your own personal realpolitik, a radical acceptance of the phrase “it is what it is.”
~100% of people live their whole lives in denial of reality.
Every individual as their own personal ratio of deliberate denial/unconscious lack of awareness, but the sum total always adds up to complete obliviousness.
Choosing to be Better Than This will take you far in life. Very far.
Once you see things as they really are, you’ll be able to spot trends before everyone else and will be able to position yourself to take advantage of them.
There are a few traits that you need to cultivate first…
Awareness of the nature of time
Most people don’t think about history (or anything else for that matter) at all.
But when/if they experience a rare moment of sentience, their view of history is that they’re at the end of it.
Not in an apocalyptic sense, but in the sense that they view the past as leading up to this moment, and that humanity/society is now a finished product. “People were stupid in the olden days, but now we’ve got it all figured out.”
The idea that all of us sitting here in this moment, in the YOTL 2025, are experiencing just another random moment in time, not any more or less significant than all the moments that preceded us or any of the moments that are yet to come, is a concept that’s literally impossible for most to comprehend.
Everyone in the past thought that their moment was the important one. They thought that they were the ones who had it all figured out, and that everyone who came before them were ignorant superstitious fools and that the future generations (i.e. you) were not worth thinking about, not because they were assholes, but because they literally couldn’t even imagine the existence of someone who wasn’t part of their immediate surroundings.
At many different points in the past, a grown man of your exact same age woke up in the morning, watched the sun rise the same way it rose today, felt the exact same thoughts and worries about his life that you feel about yours, was consumed with the exact same feelings of self-importance, etc etc. etc..
They’re all dead.
And one day you will be too.
In the future there will be countless other grown adult men of your exact same age who experience identical thoughts and feelings about their place in the world as you do about yours.
There’s nothing special about this moment or any other moment.
Once you accept that (99%+ never get here), you can start to see the absurdities of our current era.
You’ll come to understand that the way things are isn’t the way they’ll always be. Your antennae will be tuned to a different frequency from everyone else. You’ll be able to see things coming that most people can’t even imagine, and you’ll be able to position yourself in such a way that you can profit from your insights (I don’t just mean financially).
You’ll transcend the limitations of the human psyche and the invisible prison those limitations place on you. You’ll be one step closer to crossing the artificial dividing line between Man and God.
A long time ago, I read a book called The Rape of the Mind. It’s about how brainwashing works on a mass scale. The author was a psychologist who testified in the trials of returned American POWs from the Korean War who were being prosecuted for making statements against the US government while in Chinese captivity.
He claims that one of the main traits that separated the soldiers who succumbed to the enemy brainwashing from the ones who didn’t was an “awareness of time.”
It’s a true real life superpower that puts you miles ahead of literally everyone else.