Published on April 15, 2020
Life is better when you think of yourself as a curator. You are always curating. You curate your life, experiences, and knowledge. Being conscious of this opens the possibilities of creation and refinement. Curation starts with taste. You know what you like and dislike. You know what you find interesting and what you pay attention to. Seeking things that suit your taste is natural. Taste is hard to explain, but guides your life without you realizing it. By seeking things out, you curate. Curation, in its simplest form, is organizing and collecting based on taste. Your taste creates curated collections of memories, experiences, and knowledge. Some people are conscious of this, others are not. Exceptional people all share an exceptional ability to curate in their specialty. Out of curation comes creation. You create information and experiences that suit your taste. You pattern match to your curation. In the beginning, everyone’s creations aren’t very good. People with taste know they aren’t very good, they’ve seen what good looks like. Creating something is the first step to creating something good. Once you have created something, you refine it. You continue to improve all parts of the process. Refinement closes the gap between your creation and your taste. With enough attempts, you create something that matches your taste. Something that you can be proud of. What you curate impacts your whole life. You are what you curate. The internet has unlimited content and can flood you with it if you aren’t careful. Take some time to think about the things you curate in your life. Do they match your taste? Could they improve? It is important to know whether you are curating for yourself or someone else. If you are curating for someone else, your taste is lost. You can never know what other people’s tastes are. As soon as you guess, you lose your taste. The only way to be genuine to yourself is to curate for yourself, and only share when you are ready. When you are ready, share as much as possible to refine and narrow the gap between your creations and your taste. You are always curating. This article is a curation of ideas I have found. By reading it, you have curated it in your mind. I hope you realized what you are consciously curating and how it is impacting what you create. Hopefully, it helps makes your curation and next creation a little better.
I want to know what you are curating and what you have created out of it. A career? A habit? A hobby? Let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn. This video about Ira Glass on Taste is a big part of this piece.