# Daily Inspiration: The Trends Scorecard Series: Grading 20+ Years of My Predictions (Introduction)
By 

## Article Content
"Anyone can make a prediction. Few are brave enough to be graded on it." - Futurist Jim Carroll This is the introduction to a new series, The Trends Scorecard, in which I go back through 20+ years of my own keynotes and predictions, industry by industry, and grade them honestly against what actually happened. I don't mind saying that I am VERY good at what I do. After all, you don't get a client list that looks like this by being some sort of flake. Fact is, some of the most prestigious organizations in the world have booked me for leadership insight over the last 35+ years. And this is but a partial list! I mean, if NASA invites you in to predict the future of the space industry, in front of a room fall of astronauts, and you were mostly bang on despite the skepticism, you're pretty good! With that bit of self-serving and perhaps obnoxious boasting out of the way, here's a confession about my profession: most futurists never get graded. We stand on stages, we make bold claims about the decade ahead, the audience nods, the lights come up,  and then everyone goes home. Nobody ever circles back five, ten, or twenty years later to check whether any of it came true. It's been a remarkably accountability-free line of work. So I decided to do something about that. For more than two decades, I've been telling audiences in just about every industry on earth what was coming next. Those talks and blog posts are all still sitting there, time-stamped, in my archive. Which means I can do the one thing futurists tend to avoid: pull up what I actually said, line it up against reality, and mark it with a grade. Hits, misses, and the ones where I had the direction right but was too optimistic on the timing. How did I do this? I used AI. Actually, I used Claude to extract all of my posts - many thousands of them - and process them industry by industry. It then took that, put them together into my forecasts (with dates) and then graded them based on where we are today. And that's what I'll share over the next 10 days. Hits and misses and the "I was right but too early" ones. Why bother grading myself? Because the predictions that landed weren't lucky guesses. They came from a single, repeatable method based on hard-core research. It's the same process I use today: Watch where the technology or other trend curve is bending. Assume it bends faster than the consensus expects. Follow it all the way to its logical conclusion, even when that conclusion sounds absurd at the time. That's it. That's the whole trick. That's how I figure out the future. Take a trend, make it faster, and see where it goes. And the only way to prove a method works is to test it against the scoreboard which is exactly what this series does. What the series covers Each post takes one industry, digs up my real predictions across the years, and grades them. Then it turns around and asks the more important question: knowing the method works, where does this industry go next? Each scorecard is paired with my recent "Way Forward" thinking for that sector, so you get both halves: here's what I called, and here's exactly where it's all heading. The industries in the series: Manufacturing Healthcare Automotive & Transportation Energy & Utilities Agriculture & Food Retail & Consumer Insurance Financial Services & Banking Education Construction & Infrastructure Across all of them, one pattern stayed constant. Volatility is real, acceleration is relentless, and in every single sector the future is arriving faster than other experts believed it would. That's not a coincidence - it's my entire thesis. And it's the reason I'll close every post the same way I've closed keynotes for years: Some people see a trend and see a threat. Innovators see the same trend and see nothing but opportunity. Check in tomorrow!

---
Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/06/daily-inspiration-the-trends-scorecard-series-grading-20-years-of-my-predictions-introduction/