The Power of Sharing Your Work and Curating Information

Hatched by Kazuki
Sep 28, 2023
4 min read
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The Power of Sharing Your Work and Curating Information
In today's digital age, where information is readily available at our fingertips, it has become increasingly important to not only manage and efficiently deal with information but also to share and curate it. In this article, we will explore the benefits of sharing your work in public and the significance of curating information.
Sharing your work in public has its pros and cons. Some studies suggest that keeping your intentions private can increase the likelihood of actually accomplishing your goals. When you share your goals prematurely, you may receive premature praise from others, which can give you the psychological satisfaction of accomplishing a goal without actually putting in the work. However, other studies show that sharing your progress can be beneficial. For example, sharing your weight loss progress on social media can help you stay motivated and accountable.
Author Austin Kleon encourages us to "become a documentarian of what you do." By sharing your work in public, you not only reflect on your progress but also plan your next steps. It allows you to take a more iterative approach, ensuring that what you're working on aligns with the needs you have identified. Great ideas often emerge from a network of information in a transparent community. Sharing your ideas increases the likelihood of connecting the dots between your ideas and those of others. It can lead to finding mentors, forming partnerships, and connecting with like-minded individuals.
However, it's important to note that sharing your work should not derail you from actually doing the work. It should be done in a way that fits within your workflow and enhances your productivity and creativity. Once you establish the habit of sharing your work in public, it will become easier over time and feel strange to work in a vacuum.
On the other hand, curating information is a valuable skill in the information age. Your ability to succeed and thrive is connected to your ability to manage and efficiently deal with information. Curating information means using your expertise in a field to gather great content around a specific theme and presenting it in a way that educates others.
Curation provides context to information and gives it value and a specific perspective. It helps connect different resources and provides a guiding viewpoint through which to navigate them. By curating, you can save time by providing easy and organized access to information that may otherwise be difficult to find and verify.
Curation is not just about saving time or appearing more authoritative. It is about caring. Curators care about the information they curate, deeply learning about their resources, vetting bad ones, and uncovering true gems. They organize these resources to easily find, pinpoint, and share important and unique ones among the abundance of information available.
Additionally, curators have a desire to take care of an information space, to organize it, and make it easy for others to extract value from it. They also have a desire to share and inform, to educate and entertain a specific audience. Curators aim to help, support, and cultivate a community of people interested in the same topic. Ultimately, the purpose of curation is to identify and preserve what is important and then share that knowledge back with society.
By curating information, you not only help yourself but also others. You bring to light the best of what you have discovered, vetted, and added value to. Curation is not just about the individual pieces of content but about how they fit together and what story they tell. It is about recognizing patterns and seeing similarities across different pieces of culture to paint a cohesive picture of a larger trend.
In conclusion, sharing your work in public and curating information both have their benefits. They allow you to reflect, plan, and connect with others who share similar interests. Sharing your work can lead to finding mentors and forming partnerships, while curating information provides value, context, and a curated collection of resources for others to benefit from. Before we wrap up, here are three actionable pieces of advice:
- 1. Start by sharing your work in a way that feels comfortable to you. It could be through social media, a blog, or even sharing with a close-knit community.
- 2. Find the people who care about your work and connect with them. Join online groups or attend offline meetups to connect with like-minded individuals and expand your network.
- 3. When curating information, focus on providing value, context, and a specific viewpoint. Vet your resources, organize them effectively, and credit your sources systematically.
Remember, sharing your work and curating information are not just about personal gain but also about contributing to a larger community and society as a whole. So, embrace the power of sharing and curating, and watch as your work and impact grow.
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