WATCH (like 1million+ others, my TEDx talk, now on ted.com), the public speaking lesson you never had, and BUY the companion Speaking With Purpose e/audiobook. |
The past is a memory. A thought arriving in the present. The future is merely anticipated, another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment.
Forget the year just lived or the one which tempts you into thinking away from this moment.
I wish you nothing but the awareness of the joyous now.
Now.
(Something I selfishly wish for myself).
Here’s to kicking ass in 2014.
Unplugged!
Created a half a year ago during some random flight. Found and now sharing in the hope it offers value to someone:
Which are you (you can be more than one)? What others am I missing?
Devised by David Clearwater, Venture Manager at Hikurangi Foundation with inspiration from the Social Lean Canvas (obviously).
“Rarely can a response make something better—what makes something better is connection”
Doing something different that has an ongoing positive effect.
What’s yours…?
Traditionally, a curator researches and puts together a collection which speaks to a narrative and / or serves a larger idea in art galleries and / or museums.
In the current digital habitat, all can participate in this activity, so the challenge is honing the skills and leveraging the tools. Why?
Because for you and the organisation / company you serve, curation will be at the forefront of:
How?
Here we go:
1. Find : Track other digital curators to emulate / learn from.
Follow / learn from Tina or Jason or Maria or Shaun or the Open Culture peeps etc—rather just serving individual tastes, these guys are also aiming to inspire, educate, challenge, explode wonder, intrigue, curiosity, in their audience.
2. Find : Deliberately forage content from many sources.
Online is a noisy place and it’s not simple to find the signal. For many of us with the tools such as advanced search techniques plus RSS it’s a simple case of making the web work for you. RSS allows for a filtering on a delicious scale which when mashed up with things like IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes can become the perfect recipe for making yourself look double awesome.
3. Follow : Click those inspirational digital breadcrumbs.
Be careful not to get stuck in the filter bubble—sites like Tumblr and Pinterest exemplify curating platforms plus once you start clicking you will discover how deep the rabbit hole goes. Don’t worry too much and just click away, flow around areas of interest, follow those links and see where those web-roads take you. You’ll be astonished with the gems you’ll find.
4. Focus : Sharpen the sights and cull the chaff to find the good stuff.
Now you’ve been using the above tools / techniques for a while it’s time to sort and strain. It might be you’ll decide to stop following certain feeds and replace them with ones who serve more specific content. It should always be a trial and error process in pursuit of revelatory inspiration.
5. Frame : Context is king so reposition & tell stories with the new found ideas.
The best curators (some listed above) contextualise the treasures found by weaving a narrative around. This adds the much needed context for the audience and yourself when you return years later plus demonstrates your ability to join ideas into salient points. It’s time to shape the reason and link the work to creative action (whether that be an infographic, white space in an established industry, applying divergent technologies into traditional approaches, learning from obscure voices from other sectors to influence innovative strategies etc). Wrap those finds up in beautiful potential.
So examples of where this can be applied:
…you get the idea!
Follow the plan and basically suck the juicy wisdom out of the web then humanise it for good.
How relevant is curation in your role / organisation? And who else is talking about this as a skillset (am keen to learn / connect)? Riff in the comments!
“To appreciate Jobs’ and Musk’s contributions, you must pull the camera back. What they did uniquely was to imagine the broader ecosystems in which those products could become transformative. To do that involved an intimate understanding not just of the technology but of what would be necessary in design, logistics, and the business model to launch those products and make them truly compelling to potential customers. You can describe both men as amazing designers. But their design genius should be thought of as not just an obsession with satisfying shapes and appealing user interfaces. Those matter, but the start point is broader, system-level design. Most innovation is like a new melody. For Jobs and Musk it’s the whole symphony.”
So many quotable lines from this amazing article : The shared genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs
sonder – n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
