The Non-Obvious Guides
The other guide series treat you like a dummy or an idiot. The Non-Obvious Guides do the opposite. Each one is written by an expert who actually does the work, and each delivers what a great mentor would tell you over coffee: just the useful parts, in about an hour.
A Different Kind Of How-To
Every guide is sized to be finished in a single sitting, on a flight or an afternoon, and then used the next morning.
Not journalists summarizing a field from the outside. Each author has spent a career doing the thing the guide is about.
No filler chapters to hit a page count, no theory for its own sake. The advice you would get from a mentor who respects your time.
Where The Series Came From
The series started with a trend Rohit named Light Speed Learning: the modern assumption that you can teach yourself just about anything, quickly, if someone will only give you the useful part.
Two decades ago the shelves belonged to guides written for dummies and idiots, and that framing worked because a generation was happy to laugh at itself. Readers today are not. What they face instead is a different pair of bad options. One kind of guidebook talks down to you and fills its pages with definitions you did not need. The other runs seven hundred pages and still leaves you without a single thing to do on Monday. The free alternative, an afternoon of videos and blog posts, means doing all the curation yourself and never quite knowing what is out of date.
The Non-Obvious Guides were built for the people caught in the middle, the ones Rohit calls Time-Starved Doers: curious, ambitious, short on hours, allergic to nonsense, and still willing to trust an expert who has earned it. Every guide is useful, actionable, opinionated and relevant, with an interior designed around templates and frameworks rather than walls of text.
The whole series is published by Ideapress Publishing, sold in bookstores across the US and internationally, with several translations underway. The first five titles have since been redesigned and republished as second editions.
The Library
Pick the one you need this week. Every title is available in print and digital.
Calling All Experts
The Guides are written by a growing roster of expert authors, and we are always looking for the next one. If you have deep expertise in your field and a knack for giving practical advice, we want to hear your idea.
Pitch Your Guide →
Want To Use These Trends?
Bring this trend and more to your group with a customized keynote presentation or workshop session with Rohit Bhargava. Non-Obvious Thinkers win the future. Let’s explore how we can help you do this for yourself.
Learn More & Check Availability
Want More Non-Obvious Ideas?
The Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter brings you the five or six most fascinating and overlooked stories of the week, with a quick take on why each one matters.
One email every Thursday. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
The Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter
The most interesting stories of the week, and why they matter. Join more than 25,000 readers.
One email every Thursday. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
