Every year around this time, rankings, predictions and retrospectives start flowing in from left and right. I call them December Lists. They look into the past or in the future with a predominantly subjective take on things.
List a structured approach to dealing with life as it happens, a sort of a mechanism to grant you the feeling that you are actually behind the wheel, and it is not life just happening to you. Or… They could be as normal as your grocery shopping agenda or your personal branding online. The latter usually evolves into a complete frenzy at the end of each year.
“The Best” of this and that in year XXXX, “5 Predictions” of something or other in year XXXX+1, “My Top YY” or “Your Ultimate List For Saving Christmas and New Year’s”. Whether there are useful to you or not is a strictly subjective take. But this is not important. They are there for you to read or not, to accept or discard.
Some of them December Lists are pretty cool. For example, I watched a mashup of the best 25 movies in 2018, and it was fascinating and well done. Others are just full of air, as the usual predictions for where digital is going to go. Social Media has been replaced by Artificial Intelligence, Automation by Machine Learning.
Essentially every year it is pretty much the same thing with minor variations. Once a buzzword wears off, it is no longer listed. But this does not mean that the prediction is already widely accepted and applied. In social media, there are more companies not knowing what to do with it doing a bad job at it than those who actually utilise it to their advantage. Same goes for Artificial Intelligence.
It is interesting how the business is attracted by the newest buzzword rather than focusing first on building a solid base working on the one that lost its lustre but still presenting an opportunity. I am not sure that those December Lists became the chicken or the egg type of thing, but they did. And because of them and the business ever-shifting attention span, opportunities continue to be missed daily.
Photo credit: Pablo by Buffer
Copyright © 2018 Borislav Kiprin. All Rights Reserved.
