Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
We’re living in a low trust world right now and, as Seth Godin puts it, what people want in a low trust world is someone to trust.
We’re not in short supply of ideas, stories, and content. The market is flooded with them.
Most of it is selfish, shallow, and low value. But such is the volume, there’s a lot of really great newsletters, podcasts, and videos out there, too.
Challenge is finding it because, for me at least, the writers I most enjoy rarely have high engagement on social. Some do, but in general, LinkedIn doesn’t serve them up to me. I stumble upon them.
And whilst I’d love you to introduce me to the next ‘Paul Graham’ I’ve not yet discovered, a Curator would be even more valuable.
One whose taste and intentions I can trust. That person is worth more than one Paul Graham, because she’s introducing me to five ideas, worthy of Paul Graham collected from multiple sources, every week.
People like James Clear, Harry Dry, and Austin Kleon are curators in the very obvious sense.
But curation goes deeper than ‘just’ finding and sharing another person’s ideas.
World-class curation helps you develop world-class ideas. Curating what you’ve read and watched, but also what you’ve experienced and witnessed.
As Rick Rubin says, self-expression is not about you.
“Everything we are comes from outside of us. The data that we take in from which we make, whatever it is that we make comes from outside of us, all of it. None of it starts with us. Everything starts outside of us… We have a storehouse of all of the stuff that we've experienced over the course of our lives, and then we can find connections between those things from the past and these things happening now, whatever it may be.” Rick Rubi
The quality of your thinking directly stems from the quality of your curation.
Today more than ever, because we’re drowning in content, but that cascade of excess content is your opportunity. Take a look back and you’ll see what’s truly possible then you curate freely available material.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, Time Warner hired Bob Pitman to launch a new music channel - MTV.
Pitman was from a radio background and aware that every major artist created a music video when they released a new single. If The Rolling Stones couldn’t fly out to Australia to promote their latest single, the video was released to do it for them.
But other than that, very little was done with the video.
Pitman recognised this as a gold mine of free, underutilised material, which led to the launch of MTV as a 24-hour music channel.
Radio stations didn't pay record labels to play music, so MTV envisaged using this same model. Just as radio had DJs, video radio would have VJs so audiences could 'bond with a human being' between videos. The curator, the commentator, the pundit.
MTV subsequently become billion dollar cultural phenomenon through the 80s and 90s.
In those times, we weren't awash with free content like we are today. Most bad, some great. For each individual niche, there’s an opportunity to be the curator. Find the good stuff, share it with your audience.
You combine that role as curator with one as pundit introducing your own opinions and spins on what you find.
It’s simple, not easy.
If you want to leverage your expertise, become niche famous, and subsequently build excess demand, that’s one very accessible route to take.
Want to become a thought leader?
Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
