Hello Friends,
Greetings from Barcelona☀️
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If you are joining for the first time, welcome to our deep dive into all things creativity, facilitation, and learning.
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When I was a teenager I used to love making mixtapes.
I would spend hours collecting, selecting, arranging, songs that I would package up and give to friends as gifts.
Creating mixtapes was my introduction to the art of curation.
I didn’t think much about it at the time. But I had a tried-and-tested method in creating something new out of existing pieces👇.
Since then I’ve realized that curation is everywhere.
It’s not only what happens in museums and galleries. It’s the craft of DJ’s, chefs, teachers, artists, gardeners, facilitators, hosts, newsletter writers, marketers, and creators of all kinds.
Curation also shows up in our everyday lives. When we pursue a hobby, start a collection, or host a dinner party.
Learning how to excel at curation can increase your impact and bring more creativity into your work and life.
So what is curation? And how can you excel at it?
That’s our quest for this week🔎
👉The Art of Curation Podcast
👉8 Lessons from Maria Popova about how to curate well
Plus
👉Brand New Facilitator Forum Podcast
Let’s dive right in!
🖼️The Art of Curation
A podcast produced by Flipboard‘s head of creators Mia Quagliarello. In it she interviews tastemakers who excel in the “art and science of selection”.
I listened to the interview with the Editor-in-Chief Julia Lu of The Collector, a site with curated articles on history, art, and artists.
Here are 3 things I learned about curation from Lu:
👉Collecting and curating are related but different
Curating is selecting and highlighting from a collection what you want to present to someone else.
👉Curating can help fill our knowledge gaps and surface hidden connections.
This is especially important in filling in the gaps in historical perspectives.
👉Curating is about creating interconnected wormholes:
Curating done well leads you on a journey of discovery. Like the Collector’s article on the 7 Fascinating Facts About Marie Antionette.
What curated wormhole have you found yourself in lately?
💡8 Lessons in Curation with Maria Popova
I know a lot of you already subscribe to Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings (recently renamed The Marginalian) newsletter. I consider her to be one of the great curators of our time.
So I did a little investigating to see what we can learn from her about the art of curation.
I came across an old Tim Ferrispodcast interview with Popovawhere he tries to dissect (his word!) her craft.
As she describes her newsletter to Ferris, Popova also gives us a brilliant definition of curation:
“It’s a record of my thought process, trying to navigate my way through the world, and understand my place it in, understand how we relate to one another, how different pieces of the world relate to each other, and create a pattern of meaning out of seemingly unrelated meaningless information.”
Here are 8 lessons that I learned from Popova on the art of curation:
1 👉Embrace your inner-curator. Popova describes herself as a reader, writer, “interestingness hunter-gatherer” and curious mind at large. Curation is her job description and her identity.
2 👉Have a guiding question. Her guiding question is how to live well. It’s simple and profound. 15 years later there is still more to discover.
3 👉Practice pattern recognition. She studies a wide range of disciplines which gives her rich terrain for making connections and finding hidden gems.
4 👉Develop a note-taking system. Popova has an elaborate note-taking system that helps her record patterns and themes from what she reads and index ideas.
5 👉Follow tangents. For example, references and citations are potential hyperlinks to other works.
6 👉Focus on the timely and timeless. The majority of what she reads is old and out of print. That helps her answer her guiding question “how to live well” with a timeless quality.
7 👉Be consistent. Maria Popova has been writing Brain Pickings for 15 years. She now has a vast library of connected material and publishing that is the result of being consistent.
8 👉Get 8 hours of sleep. Her work is all about making associations with seemingly unrelated ideas. In order for that to happen, she says that her “associative chains” need to be firing. That can only happen if her mind is rested for 8 hours each night.
Listen to the full interview 👉here.
Who are the most prolific curators you know and what have you learned from them?
New Podcast: The Facilitator Forum
A brand new podcast by professional facilitator Julia Winston to meet “a magical mix of people across disciplines and industries who spend their time guiding groups.”
I inhaled the first three episodes over the weekend.
I was especially thrilled to listen to Episode 3: Cracking Open our Hearts through the Arts on the power of arts in facilitation with friend and exceptional facilitator Adam Rosendahl.
He is the founder of Late Nite Art. And he is also a skilled curator, creating modern-day mix tapes on Spotify. Check out his playlists👉here.
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Creatively yours,
