Better and Faster

Better and Faster Plot Summary

Introduction

In our fast-paced world, where the rate of change is accelerating exponentially, the ability to identify and capitalize on opportunities has never been more crucial. The difference between those who thrive and those who merely survive often comes down to how quickly they can spot emerging patterns and adapt their strategies accordingly. But spotting these patterns requires more than just luck or intuition—it demands a systematic approach to innovation and a fundamental shift in mindset. At the heart of this systematic approach is the recognition that our natural tendencies often lead us astray. Most of us are programmed to protect the status quo, to rely on what has worked in the past, and to optimize existing processes rather than explore new territories. This farmer-like mentality may have served humanity well for thousands of years, but in today's rapidly evolving landscape, it has become a liability. Instead, we need to cultivate the hunter's mindset—one characterized by insatiability, curiosity, and a willingness to destroy what no longer serves us. By understanding the six patterns of opportunity—convergence, divergence, cyclicality, redirection, reduction, and acceleration—we can train ourselves to spot and exploit emerging trends before our competitors do.

Chapter 1: Farmer Traps vs. Hunter Instincts: Understanding Two Mindsets

The fundamental distinction between successful innovators and those who get left behind lies in their approach to opportunity. Throughout human history, we've been primarily farmers—creatures of habit who find fertile ground, plant seeds, and then repeat the same process season after season. This approach made perfect sense in a stable, slowly changing world. But in today's environment of rapid disruption, the farmer mindset has become a serious liability. The farmer mindset manifests in three dangerous traps. First is complacency—once we find success, we become comfortable and stop looking for new opportunities. Consider the cautionary tale of Smith Corona, a dominant typewriter company that failed to adapt to the computing revolution despite early partnership attempts with Acer. Similarly, Blackberry's initial success blinded it to emerging consumer preferences, ultimately leading to its downfall. The second trap is repetition—reflexively doing more of what worked before, even when circumstances change. Blockbuster Video's stubborn commitment to its retail store model despite the rise of online streaming exemplifies this trap. The third and perhaps most insidious trap is protectiveness—fiercely guarding what we've built instead of evolving with the times. Kodak's reluctance to embrace digital photography, despite inventing it, perfectly illustrates this self-defeating tendency. To counter these farmer traps, we must cultivate three hunter instincts. The first is insatiability—never being satisfied with current success and constantly pushing for improvement. Capital One exemplified this trait by continuously experimenting with new credit products and business models, allowing it to survive economic crises that destroyed hundreds of competitors. The second instinct is curiosity—actively exploring new territories and ideas rather than optimizing existing ones. Ron Finley, who transformed from fashion designer to urban gardening revolutionary in South Central LA, demonstrates how curiosity can lead to remarkable innovation. The third instinct is willingness to destroy—the courage to abandon what's working now to create space for something potentially better. Eric Ripert, the celebrated chef, maintains his Michelin stars by constantly removing popular dishes from his menu to force continued innovation. These contrasting mindsets don't just apply to business—they shape how we approach our careers, relationships, and personal growth. M.C. Hammer's spectacular rise and fall shows how the farmer mindset can destroy individual success just as easily as corporate fortunes. The rapper's inability to adapt his spending habits after his initial success led to bankruptcy, despite releasing eight more albums after his hit "Too Legit to Quit." Similarly, many professionals find themselves trapped in careers that no longer serve them because they've invested too much to consider alternatives. The transformation from farmer to hunter doesn't happen automatically—it requires deliberate effort and often a triggering event. For many successful innovators, this awakening comes through adversity. When our security is threatened, complacency isn't an option, and we become more willing to destroy what's worked in the past and more insatiable in our quest for something new. This explains why some of the most successful companies were founded during economic recessions—chaos creates opportunity by forcing innovation. The hunter's mindset isn't about reckless risk-taking; it's about calculated opportunism. It requires understanding patterns that create opportunity and developing the instincts to act on them before others do. By cultivating these instincts, we can break free from the limitations of our farming past and thrive in an increasingly unpredictable future.

Chapter 2: Six Patterns of Opportunity: The Framework for Innovation

Identifying patterns of opportunity is the fundamental skill that separates successful innovators from the rest. Just as mathematician Robert Lang discovered patterns that revolutionized origami, there exist patterns of opportunity in business that can be systematically identified and exploited. Based on the analysis of a quarter-million ideas and billions of consumer choices tracked through Trend Hunter's vast database, six distinct patterns have emerged as the primary drivers of successful innovation across all industries. Traditional trend-spotting approaches focus on identifying megatrends like environmentalism or social media. However, this approach offers limited competitive advantage since these trends are obvious to everyone. The real opportunity lies in identifying the patterns created by these megatrends—the specific ways in which consumer behavior and market dynamics shift in response to larger changes. These patterns are the true harbingers of future business opportunities. Consider how Facebook's success created numerous patterns of opportunity. Rather than competing directly with the social network giant—a nearly impossible task—shrewd entrepreneurs identified specific patterns that Facebook's dominance created. Twitter emerged from the divergence pattern, offering something opposite to Facebook's friend-focused network by allowing users to follow strangers. Snapchat capitalized on another divergence opportunity by creating temporary photo sharing in contrast to Facebook's permanent archive. Instagram, meanwhile, found success through acceleration, intensifying the artistic aspect of photo sharing that was underserved by Facebook's utilitarian approach. The six patterns of opportunity provide a comprehensive framework for identifying these kinds of opportunities. Convergence involves combining multiple products, services, or trends to create something new and valuable. Divergence focuses on breaking free from the mainstream through differentiation, personalization, or rebellion. Cyclicality capitalizes on predictable patterns of recurrence in fashion, economics, or generations. Redirection harnesses existing momentum but channels it in a new direction. Reduction simplifies or focuses on a specific aspect of a business or product. Finally, acceleration identifies and dramatically enhances a critical feature. These patterns don't operate in isolation—most successful innovations leverage multiple patterns simultaneously. Understanding how these patterns interact and overlap is crucial for identifying the most promising opportunities. For example, the rise of craft beer represents both divergence (breaking from mainstream brewing) and cyclicality (returning to traditional brewing methods), while also incorporating elements of reduction (focusing on quality over quantity) and acceleration (intensifying flavor profiles). The power of this framework lies in its applicability across industries and contexts. Whether you're launching a startup, developing a new product line, or pivoting an established business, these patterns provide a systematic approach to identifying opportunities that others miss. By training yourself to recognize these patterns in the world around you, you develop a hunter's instinct for spotting potential before your competitors do.

Chapter 3: Convergence and Divergence: Creating and Breaking from Mainstream

Convergence represents one of the most powerful and accessible patterns of opportunity. It occurs when previously separate products, services, trends, or experiences are combined to create something new and valuable. We experience convergence daily in Starbucks, which converges coffee, social space, and internet access into a "third place" between home and work. Similarly, our smartphones converge computing, photography, music, and communication into a single device. However, convergence requires more than simply combining two random ideas. When Colgate attempted to converge toothpaste with frozen meals through "Colgate Kitchen Entrees," consumers were understandably confused and the product failed spectacularly. Successful convergence requires identifying complementary elements that create genuine value when combined. Kyla Gutsche's medical tattooing business exemplifies effective convergence by combining micro-pigmentation techniques, prison tattooing skills, and Renaissance painting methods to restore features for cancer patients and accident victims. Dave Dahl's "Dave's Killer Bread" demonstrates how convergence can transform a modest business into a powerhouse brand. While the company initially gained traction through its shocking name and Dahl's ex-convict backstory (divergence), it was the convergence of multiple trends—organic ingredients, social entrepreneurship, environmental sustainability, and prison rehabilitation—that propelled it to a $50 million enterprise. This "shotgun approach" to convergence increased the likelihood of success by riding multiple concurrent trends simultaneously. Divergence, meanwhile, represents the opposite approach—intentionally breaking away from the mainstream to create something distinctive. This pattern capitalizes on the psychological tendency to notice and value what's different. David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim's "Uglydoll" brand exemplifies divergence by deliberately creating plush toys that rejected conventional beauty standards with their mismatched eyes, protruding tongues, and sharp teeth. Their rebellion against perfection resonated so strongly that the brand generated over $100 million in annual revenue. Similarly, Red Bull succeeded by diverging from conventional beverage marketing in multiple ways. Despite its awful taste and high price (or perhaps because of these qualities), the brand positioned itself as a lifestyle choice rather than a flavored drink. Its deliberately mysterious marketing approach and controversial reputation helped it become a $15 billion empire. BeautifulPeople.com's dating site similarly diverged from inclusive mainstream dating platforms by explicitly rejecting most applicants, generating outrage but also creating a coveted sense of exclusivity. Divergence doesn't always mean rebellion; it can also manifest as personalization, customization, or status-seeking. These sub-patterns reflect different ways people break from the mainstream to express individuality or gain distinction. The proliferation of niche dating sites—from JDate for Jewish singles to Date My Dog for canine enthusiasts—demonstrates how divergence can create valuable micro-markets within larger industries. The key insight connecting convergence and divergence is that both patterns allow innovators to create something distinctive without necessarily inventing something entirely new. By combining existing elements in novel ways or deliberately breaking from established norms, entrepreneurs can create compelling offerings that capture consumer attention and loyalty. Understanding when to converge and when to diverge is essential for developing a balanced innovation strategy that can respond to different market opportunities.

Chapter 4: Cyclicality and Redirection: Leveraging Patterns and Channeling Forces

Cyclicality represents the pattern of predictably recurring opportunities. Just as the giant sea turtle follows a seemingly random path that actually repeats a 12,000-mile migration pattern, markets and consumer preferences follow cycles that appear chaotic in the short term but reveal predictable patterns over time. Successful hunters develop an eye for these repeating patterns and position themselves to capitalize on them before they become obvious to others. Retro and nostalgia represent the most visible cyclical patterns. The massive popularity of AMC's "Mad Men" perfectly illustrates how cyclical patterns can create business opportunities. The show not only captured viewers' fascination with 1960s aesthetics but also sparked a revival of mid-century fashion, furniture, and cocktail culture. Canadian Club whiskey, featured prominently in the show, seized this opportunity to revitalize its brand through retro-themed marketing that celebrated its Prohibition-era heyday. Similarly, A&W restaurants reversed their decline by reconnecting with their 1960s drive-in roots, attracting nostalgic baby boomers who remembered the brand from their youth. Economic cycles create another predictable pattern of opportunity. During downturns, consumer behavior changes in predictable ways that create openings for astute businesses. After the 2008 economic collapse, Sophia Amoruso's vintage clothing business NastyGal thrived by providing fashion-conscious but budget-constrained consumers with affordable alternatives to luxury brands. Meanwhile, Walmart strategically upgraded its stores during the recession to attract middle-class shoppers seeking value, resulting in substantial sales growth when competitors were contracting. Generational cycles also create predictable patterns as values, preferences, and priorities shift from one generation to the next. Shu Uemura's cosmetics empire demonstrates how understanding these cycles can drive business innovation. In the 1960s, he capitalized on global fascination with American glamour by bringing Hollywood makeup techniques to Japan. Decades later, his company rode the 2006 luxury boom by creating diamond-encrusted false eyelashes for Madonna, followed by affordable versions for her teenage fans. Redirection, meanwhile, represents the art of channeling existing momentum rather than fighting against it. Instead of opposing a trend or force, redirection involves skillfully reframing it to your advantage. Amsterdam's water utility Waternet faced the seemingly impossible challenge of preventing public urination during Queen's Day celebrations. Rather than futilely trying to stop the behavior through fines or prohibitions, they redirected it by creating "Potje Pissen," an interactive urinal game that turned the misbehavior into a competition. By channeling rather than fighting the unstoppable force, they protected the city's canals while improving public perception of the utility. This pattern can be seen in Frederick the Great's clever approach to introducing potatoes to Prussia. When mandating potato cultivation failed, he declared potatoes a royal vegetable reserved for nobles, expecting (and getting) his subjects to steal and grow the forbidden crop themselves. Similarly, McDonald's successfully redirected negative social media momentum with its "Your Questions Answered" campaign, which transformed potentially damaging rumors into opportunities for authentic engagement. Perhaps the most striking example of redirection is De Beers' transformation of diamonds from semi-precious stones into essential symbols of romance and commitment. By redirecting public perception through the slogan "A Diamond is Forever" and strategic celebrity endorsements, the company created an enduring psychological link between diamonds and love that revolutionized the jewelry market. These patterns teach us that successful innovation often doesn't require fighting against established trends or creating something entirely new. By recognizing cyclical patterns and skillfully redirecting existing forces, entrepreneurs can position themselves to capitalize on predictable opportunities that others miss.

Chapter 5: Reduction and Acceleration: Simplifying and Intensifying Key Features

Reduction and acceleration represent complementary approaches to innovation that focus on manipulating specific aspects of a product or service. Reduction involves simplifying a business concept or focusing it more intensely on a specific idea, while acceleration identifies a critical feature and dramatically enhances it. Both patterns can create compelling opportunities by challenging conventional wisdom about what customers want. The reduction pattern capitalizes on the power of simplicity and specialization. Contrary to the common belief that broader offerings appeal to larger markets, reduction often creates more passionate customer response by doing one thing exceptionally well. Josh Opperman's "I Do Now I Don't" exemplifies this approach by focusing exclusively on reselling engagement rings from broken relationships. By narrowing his focus to this specific niche and removing layers between buyers and sellers, Opperman built a multimillion-dollar business that larger, more diversified competitors overlooked. Similarly, Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger's Fiverr succeeded by reducing the complexity of hiring freelancers to its simplest form—a single $5 price point and standardized service offerings. By eliminating negotiation, complex contracts, and other friction points, they created a platform that now lists over 2 million services and ranks among the world's 200 most popular websites. Jack Dorsey's Square demonstrates how reduction can transform even complex industries like financial services by stripping away unnecessary complexity from payment processing. Acceleration, meanwhile, represents the opposite approach—taking an extreme position by dramatically enhancing a specific feature, even at the risk of alienating some customers. Will Dean's Tough Mudder exemplifies this pattern by accelerating the challenges in obstacle racing to extreme levels. By intensifying the difficulty with ice baths, fire pits, and electric shock obstacles, Dean created an event so memorable that participants eagerly share their experiences and proudly display their injuries. This acceleration of challenge generated over $70 million in revenue within just two years. Nicole DeBoom's Skirt Sports similarly accelerated a specific aspect of athletic wear—femininity—by creating running skirts for women who wanted to maintain their feminine identity while competing. Though initially controversial, this acceleration of a single feature created a distinctive brand that spawned the popular "Skirt Chaser 5k" racing series. IBM's development of Watson represents perhaps the most ambitious example of acceleration, as the company repeatedly challenged itself to create increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems capable of defeating human champions at chess and Jeopardy before tackling real-world applications in medicine and finance. What makes these patterns particularly powerful is their counterintuitive nature. Conventional business wisdom often pushes toward broader offerings and balanced feature sets. Reduction and acceleration challenge this conventional thinking by suggesting that sometimes less is more (reduction) and sometimes more is more (acceleration). The key insight is that success doesn't come from trying to please everyone with a moderately good solution, but from creating something that a specific group of people will find irresistible. Both patterns also share an important characteristic: they require making deliberate trade-offs. Reduction means giving up breadth for depth, while acceleration means potentially alienating some customers to create passionate advocacy among others. These trade-offs make these patterns challenging to implement in established organizations that typically seek to minimize risk and maximize market size. However, for entrepreneurs and innovators willing to make bold choices, reduction and acceleration offer powerful paths to creating distinctive and compelling offerings.

Chapter 6: Applying the Patterns: Finding Better Ideas Faster

Transitioning from understanding the patterns of opportunity to actively applying them requires a systematic approach to idea generation and refinement. The hunting process involves not just recognizing patterns but deliberately using them to generate and evaluate potential opportunities. This structured approach helps overcome the limitations of intuition and traditional brainstorming methods. The first step is to establish a proper hunting ground by consciously defining where you'll look for inspiration. Rather than relying solely on ideas within your industry, effective hunters scan adjacent fields and even completely unrelated domains for transferable insights. Marco Morosini, one of Ferrari's top designers, spends half his working hours designing women's fashions to maintain fresh perspective—a practice that might seem counterintuitive for a company creating ultra-masculine sports cars, but one that provides crucial cross-pollination of ideas. After establishing your hunting ground, the next step is to collect examples of innovation both within and beyond your field. This collection process should be deliberate and thorough, looking not just for obvious innovations but also for slightly related ideas that might provide unexpected inspiration. For example, when searching for ideas for a pop-up retail concept, looking at examples of in-store innovations, window displays, and even vending machines can spark connections that direct examination of other pop-up shops might miss. The critical insight in this process is to throw away your first ideas and clusters. Our brains naturally gravitate toward familiar patterns and obvious connections—what we might call "farming" our existing knowledge. True innovation requires pushing beyond these initial associations to discover deeper, less obvious patterns. By forcing yourself to look at your collected examples through the lens of the six patterns—convergence, divergence, cyclicality, redirection, reduction, and acceleration—you can identify clusters of opportunity that others miss. For instance, examining a collection of retail innovations might initially suggest grouping them by industry or product type. However, re-clustering them through pattern-based thinking might reveal more valuable insights: some innovations represent "stores within stores" (reduction), others create "billboard stores" (redirection), while still others leverage "virtual reality" (acceleration) or tap into "nostalgic escape" (cyclicality). These pattern-based clusters provide much richer starting points for innovation than conventional categories. This methodical approach to hunting is particularly important because most industries are in a state of rapid transformation. To understand the pace of change and identify emerging opportunities, it helps to compare how customer experiences have evolved over relatively short periods. For example, examining how moviegoing changed from 2000 to 2010—from newspaper listings and physical tickets to smartphone apps and streaming alternatives—reveals not just superficial shifts but fundamental transformations in multiple industries simultaneously. By tracking key industries—including fashion, technology, retail, media, food, and entrepreneurship—through this pattern-based lens, you can identify cross-industry trends that suggest new opportunities. Fashion's emphasis on personalization presages similar trends in other industries; technology's shift from hardware to experience points toward broader consumer preferences; retail's integration of physical and digital experiences creates new convergence opportunities. Understanding these cross-industry patterns helps you anticipate changes in your own field before they become obvious to competitors. The ultimate goal is to find clusters of opportunity—groups of products, services, or concepts that follow similar ideas and collectively signify deeper consumer needs. The proliferation of caffeinated products beyond coffee—from energy drinks to chocolate bars to gels—represents such a cluster, which entrepreneurs like Awake Chocolate successfully exploited by understanding the underlying pattern rather than simply creating another energy drink.

Chapter 7: Case Studies: Real-World Applications of Hunter Thinking

To illustrate how the six patterns of opportunity and hunter mindset work in practice, we can examine two compelling case studies that demonstrate these principles in action. These examples show how individuals with limited resources but powerful pattern recognition skills were able to create remarkable innovations by applying the framework systematically. The first case involves Sang Kim, a renowned Toronto sushi chef who faced the daunting challenge of launching a restaurant in just thirty days. Rather than following the conventional path of spending a year meticulously planning every detail, Kim embraced the hunter mindset by creating urgency, publicly committing to his challenge, and launching a blog that invited crowd participation. This approach exemplifies the insatiability of the hunter—setting an audacious goal and pursuing it relentlessly. Instead of relying solely on his existing knowledge, Kim traveled to Seoul, South Korea, to immerse himself in new culinary experiences. This curiosity-driven hunt initially seemed unproductive until Kim shifted his focus from trendy restaurants to street food and nostalgic dishes from his childhood. This cyclical pattern inspired him to create a nostalgic Korean restaurant featuring updated versions of traditional street food. By convergently combining this concept with the popularity of reality cooking shows, Kim developed "Yakitori Top Chef," a competition that invited eight chefs to create signature skewers for his restaurant menu. Taking the convergence pattern further, Kim transformed the front of his restaurant into a sushi school, creating an immersive educational experience that generated additional revenue. This multi-dimensional approach—combining restaurant, cooking competition, and educational facility—exemplifies how convergence can multiply business opportunities. Despite construction delays and skepticism from critics, Kim's restaurant opened on the thirtieth day as promised and has since been rated one of Toronto's top dining destinations. The second case study features Taylor Conroy, who transformed from successful real estate entrepreneur to social innovator by applying pattern recognition to charitable giving. Dissatisfied with traditional fundraising approaches—experiential giving, street solicitation, and shock advertising—Conroy conducted a series of experiments to identify more effective methods. His first experiment involved sending $100 checks to twenty-five friends with instructions to donate to their favorite charities and share their experiences on social media. This prototype demonstrated that friends enjoy giving together and that small initial investments could generate larger impacts. Building on this insight, Conroy tested a divergent approach called "Challenge Fundraising" by providing $100 of seed capital to eighteen elementary school classrooms. The resulting entrepreneurial projects doubled his goal, funding two schools in developing countries. His third experiment accelerated the competition aspect, challenging his blog readers to develop plans for turning $1,000 into $5,000 for charity. The winning idea—asking friends to donate the price of a daily coffee for forty-two days—provided another key insight about simplification. Convergently combining these insights, Conroy created Change Heroes, a platform that enables people to send personalized videos to thirty-three friends, asking each to donate $3.33 per day for three months—enough to fund a $10,000 school. This approach redirected traditional fundraising by making the experience personal, social, and technologically sophisticated. In its first year, Change Heroes raised one million dollars and funded one hundred schools, impacting 100,000 students. These case studies demonstrate how the hunter mindset and pattern recognition can transform seemingly impossible challenges into remarkable opportunities. Both Kim and Conroy succeeded not by following conventional wisdom or relying on overwhelming resources, but by systematically applying the patterns of opportunity to create innovative solutions. Their stories illustrate that effective innovation isn't about genius-level creativity or massive investment—it's about developing the hunter's instinct for spotting patterns and the courage to act on them decisively.

Summary

The essence of successful innovation lies not in extraordinary creativity or substantial resources, but in the ability to recognize and exploit patterns of opportunity before others do. This pattern recognition requires a fundamental shift from the farmer mindset—characterized by complacency, repetition, and protectiveness—to the hunter mindset of insatiability, curiosity, and willingness to destroy. By cultivating these hunter instincts and systematically applying the six patterns of opportunity—convergence, divergence, cyclicality, redirection, reduction, and acceleration—anyone can become a more effective innovator. The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, with established companies failing and new opportunities emerging daily. In this environment, the only real certainty is change itself. Those who cling to past success, resist experimentation, or protect outdated business models will inevitably fall behind. But those who embrace the hunter's approach—constantly scanning for patterns, experimenting with new ideas, and fearlessly abandoning what no longer works—will find themselves equipped to thrive amid disruption. The patterns outlined in this framework provide not just a theoretical understanding of innovation but a practical methodology for generating better ideas faster, whether you're an entrepreneur launching a startup, an executive leading a corporation, or an individual seeking to advance your career in a rapidly evolving landscape.

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Jeremy Gutsche

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