This List Will Blow Your Mind

It’s called the Mindset List. Every August since 1998, two professors at Beloit College in Wisconsin put together a list of cultural statements that can be made about the students entering college that year. For me as a business journalist, it’s a reminder of the constantly changing frame of reference that my audience and their customers are undergoing.

Here is a sample of this year’s list (the entire list can be found at www.beloit.edu/mindset/):

• GPS systems have always been available.
• Coke and Pepsi have always used recycled plastic bottles.
• Shampoo and conditioner have always been available in the same bottle.
• Electronic filing of tax returns has always been an option.
• The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.
• Employers have always been able to do credit checks on employees.
• Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.
• IBM has never made typewriters.
• They have never been able to color a tree using a raw umber Crayola.
• There has always been Pearl Jam.
• “The Tonight Show” has always been hosted by Jay Leno and started at 11:35 EST.
• They may have been given a Nintendo Game Boy to play with in the crib.
• Macaulay Culkin has always been “Home Alone.”
• Caller ID has always been available on phones.
• They never heard an attendant ask, “Want me to check under the hood?”
• Iced tea has always come in cans and bottles.
• The Hubble Space Telescope has always been eavesdropping on the heavens.
• And Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson and Stevie Ray Vaughan have always been dead.

Contact me at michael.morris@reedbusiness.com or 630/288-8057

Read my blog at www.ProRemodeler.com/blogs