The Maker’s Guide to Content Curation, Part 2: The 7 Pillars

In Part 1, I argued that curating the content of others was an excellent way to start creating content of one’s own, whether your goal is advancing your career or starting a business. 

Now I want to answer the question: how exactly do I curate content?

In this guide I’ll share the best of what I’ve discovered.

There are 7 core lessons I’ve settled on:

1. Create a repository of valuable, pre-selected material
2. Learn (and fail) in public
3. Weave the personal and the objective
4. Provide value back to the people you curate
5. Always be pitching something
6. Feed and tune your network
7. Curate for yourself

1. Create a repository of valuable, pre-selected material

This is probably the most fundamental lesson, not only for content curation but for knowledge work in general. That’s why it’s the primary focus in my online course Building a Second Brain.

It’s impossible to curate effectively just by sharing things on social media as you come across them. There’s no chance that you’ll know whether something is “the best” if you’re evaluating it in isolation. The value you provide is putting it into a broader context or narrative. And that requires collecting things in a repository before sharing them.

In 16th and 17th century Europe, it was fashionable for the wealthy and educated to keep a Wunderkammern, a “wonder chamber” or “cabinet of curiosities,” in their homes. These rooms were filled with interesting or rare artifacts – books, skeletons, jewels, shells, art, plants, minerals, taxidermy specimens, stones – from around the world. They were demonstrations of their owner’s intellect and hunger for knowledge. These collections were the precursors to modern museums, as places dedicated to the study of history, nature, and the arts.

You should do the same with your personal knowledge collection. Start by collecting a small set of valuable sources and personal insights for your own use. As it gains in size and value, start opening it to friends and colleagues. Eventually, you’ll have so much material that you can create “virtual exhibitions” for sharing publicly, which can be nothing more than websites, image galleries, or downloadable PDFs.

2. Learn (and fail) in public

One of the best ways of thinking about curation is that you are “open-sourcing your learning process.”

Pick something that you would really like to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in public, including your mistakes. By sharing your learning journey, you create an audience and a community around your learning, at times providing encouragement and other times commiseration. Seeing that others can benefit from your mistakes makes it much easier to recover from them, to push forward, and to take on bigger challenges than you would on your own.

Austin Kleon puts it perfectly in his book Show Your Work (affiliate link): 

“Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones…Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.”

The learning process is the perfect thing to share: it is constantly throwing off little odds and ends that can be posted online; it’s ok if it’s messy and incomplete; it shows evidence of consistent progress; it includes both successes and failures; and it makes reference to the best sources while also injecting your own voice and experience.