Curation

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

In the age of infinite information, the competitive advantage isn't knowledge—it's wisdom. Not those who know the most, but those who can discern what matters. Not processing power, but purpose. Those who can extract meaning, connect dots across domains, and make wise decisions despite uncertainty are more likely to thrive.

This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increased, we began to see a larger volume of curators — coolhunters, just like Gladwell had outlined in ’97, but this time in a digital space. On Tumblr, this looked like blogs of curated art or photography; on Pinterest, we saw well-crafted... See more

Writing on methods for gathering ideas, Seneca, the great stoic, suggests that authors should imitate the bees. Like a bee flying among the flowers, we ought to vary our reading and extract useful material from various sources.

When I say “I don’t know where everyone went,” I know everyone’s out there surfing the web , of course, but it feels like it’s a different place now. When the algorithms are determining everything we should be seeing, it’s a much less personal internet. The “For You” pages of the world are right, I am interested in that content, but I’m not seeing... See more

Curation as a Service (or CaaS) - I believe, as the amount of content on the web increases, there will inevitably be a need for more human curators. People who are domain experts (or have an obsession with a topic) that can sift through the garbage and collect the gems.

Technology treats the process of consuming and the process of creating as distinctly different, when the reality is that for our brains, the process of absorbing a book is not all too different from the process of producing one. We are always seeking new connections, combining and recombining old ideas to produce new ones. So why is it that we... See more

There will always be creators. But the ones who stand out in this era are also curators. People who filter their worldview so cleanly that you want to see through their eyes. People who make you feel sharper just by paying attention to what they pay attention to.