Unlocking the zeitgeist

This is a follow-up piece to my article “To Hack Growth, Startups Have to Hack Culture First”

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present, said Albert Camus. Success of an idea, product, story, or a trend is hidden in our present: in our social interactions, what we pay attention to, who and what influences us, and where and how we spend our time.

Regardless of the signals available to us in our present, we are much better in explaining our past. Hollywood, fashion, food, and other taste industries spend inordinate amount of money and talent on betting what’s going to resonate with the zeitgeist, with mixed results. Success stories are usually retroactive: we claim that something succeeded because it “captured the atmosphere,” only once it did. The question of why is often secondary.

The real challenge is to detect the mood while it is happening. To answer the question of how to get something to resonate with the atmosphere of the times, we should look for contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences in our culture, society, and economy. They are the indicators that change is ahead.