You Are a Curator. Creation is Fallacy.
Read these books and you’ll know. New ideas come from old ideas.
Sources of Ideas, Innovation & Creativity
@stevenbjohnson @petersims @MichaelMichalko @jasonfried @bill_fischer @Andy_Boynton @joshlinkner @berkun @remixeverything @austinkleon
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@stevenbjohnson | Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Johnson--writer, Web guru, and bestselling author of Everything Bad Is Good for You--delivers a sweeping look at innovation spanning nearly the whole of human history. What sparks our great ideas? Johnson breaks down the cultural, biological, and environmental fuel into seven broad "patterns," each packed with diverse, at times almost disjointed anecdotes that Johnson synthesizes into a recipe for success.
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@petersims | Little Bets
Q: What is a "little bet"? A: A little bet is a low-risk action taken to discover, develop, and test an idea. So, for instance, Chris Rock develops new comedy routines by making little bets with small audiences, while Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos makes small bets to identify opportunities in new markets.
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@MichaelMichalko | Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking
Techniques Share your thoughts with other customers: 51 of 58 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Together with 'Cracking Creativity'...dynamic duo...consider them among the best in the genre!, July 16, 2006 Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 46 of 57 people found the following review helpful: 3.0 out of 5 stars Still waiting for the revelation, August 13, 2010 7 of 7 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Guide for Creative Thinking, October 8, 2008 Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 5.0 out of 5 stars Not Even Half Done This Book...
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@jasonfried | Rework
Amazon Exclusive: Seth Godin Reviews Rework Seth Godin is the author of Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars, and Permission Marketing, as well as other international bestsellers. He is consistently one of the 25 most widely read bloggers in the English language.
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@bill_fischer @Andy_Boynton | The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen
"Humans make progress by discovering new ideas, but also, importantly, by repurposing the ones that already exist. Boynton and Fisher show how each of us can get better at this critical skill, identifying and reapplying existing ideas."―Paul Romer, Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research“Hunting is an apt metaphor. Ideas exist everywhere in the wild.
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@joshlinkner | Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity
"Josh Linkner is a tremendous business leader who has established a successful and sustainable company, as well as a culture that nurtures employees to help them maximize their potential."-Hon. Jennifer M. Granholm, Governor, State of Michigan "At Zappos, one of our core values is to be adventurous, creative, and open-minded.
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@Berkun The Myths of Innovation
In this new paperback edition of the classic bestseller, you'll be taken on a hilarious, fast-paced ride through the history of ideas. Author Scott Berkun will show you how to transcend the false stories that many business experts, scientists, and much of pop culture foolishly use to guide their thinking about how ideas change the world.
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@remixeverything Everything is a Remix
Everything is a Remix is a four-part video series about influence and appropriation in creation. This site also features an extensive collection of supplemental information about the series.
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@AustinKleon Steal Like An Artist
10 things nobody told you about being creative — a manifesto for creativity in the digital age.
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Borrowed Brilliance
Borrowing Brilliance is published by Penguin Publishing. It was a Wall Street Journal Bestseller and named as one of the Best Business Books of 2009 by Inc. Magazine. The book is about creative thinking and the innovation process. Dave writes that borrowing is not just intellectual theft, it’s actually the core creative thinking technique and that all creative thought derives from it. New ideas, he says, are constructed out of existing ideas. It’s the law of cerebral physics. BusinessWeek said about the book: “His aim is to demystify the thing that makes many a manager sweat profusely. And he’s living proof the method can produce results.”
Creation is a fallacy. Ex Nihilo creation is for gods and mythical characters. Mere mortals curate new content from old content. We remix old ideas to make new ones.
Here’s two examples from my life. Did I create or curate? It’s quite the admission, but I now think I curated.
AnswerSets – A segmentation tool.
I build a company that made a segmentation tool called AnswerSets (or Set Analyzer). I sold it to Business Objects in 1999. Was it new? No, it simply used SQL. I borrowed Venn Diagrams (Reverend John Venn 1880) to select data instead of Boolean logic (George Boole – 1854). Isn’t that crazy. I sold a company that was spawned from a problem created in 1854 that was first solved in 1880. 119 years later! That’s how long it took to gestate. Nobody said curation is a fast process.
GiftTRAP – The Gamification of Gift-Exchange
I self-publish and distribute a board game called GiftTRAP. It’s won 20+ awards. It’s in 12 languages worldwide. I began patenting the idea only to learn it was incredibly similar to a game called Personal Preferences (PS The Patent searches didn’t find it). I had never seen or heard of the game. I wasted a heap of cash chasing the creation dream. My game succeeded without a patent because I curated a unique experience. The mechanics were similar, but the experience was unique. Award winningly unique.
GiftTRAP did a better job of packaging the idea:
- More story
- More emotional connection
- More community (I crowd-sourced content for the game)
GiftTRAP has since been copied in spirit twice. I won’t name names. It’s irrelevant. Neither has been successful. They were both products with no story, no crowd, no emotion. They created. They didn’t curate.
Execution trumps Ideas.
What matters with ideas is not the source of the idea. It’s what you do with them. It’s all about who you get to care. It’s all about the story you tell and more importantly the story others tell on your behalf. It’s how you curate something that makes it successful. If you stop at creation, you are falling short. Curating content makes you think about how you can expand the scope and include more people in your project. Curation is all about connecting people emotionally to your outcome. For me, curation and crowdsourcing are very much intertwined.
Story & Experience trump Commodities & Products
Creation is a defunkt metaphor in my mind – 1.0 thinking. Curation is today’s reality. Curation is about story and experience. Look at a museum or an art gallery if you need proof. Stop trying to be creative, be curative. It’s less hard work. It produces better results. And it’s more repeatable.
Perhaps curation doesn’t sound so sexy. Perhaps there’s no black art, no magic to curation. For me curation wins every time. How about you?
Image Credit: home_of_chaos
Nick is co-founder the social curation platform Listly, that combines crowdsourcing, content curation and embedable lists to drive high-level community engagement, live inside your blog posts. Connect with Nick on Twitter · Linkedin, Facebook and G+ and follow his writing via his other guest posts and on his blogs at NickKellet.com and blog.list.ly
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