Curation
Why It Matters
In a world of infinite choice, curation IS the creative act. Bhaskar makes the case that selecting well is as important as creating. Every project I've built since reading this has this book's DNA in it.
The book that rewired everything. After this, I couldn't see curation as anything less than a creative act. Essential.
Before I read Curation, I thought of taste as something passive -- a preference you were born with. Bhaskar dismantles that completely. His argument is deceptively simple: in a world drowning in content, products, and choices, the act of selecting becomes the most important creative act of all. What changed for me was realising that every project I build is fundamentally an act of curation. Trove, my bookmarking tool, exists because of this book. The Relevance Index, which scores brands on cultural relevance, is curation with a scoring framework. Even this shelf is curation in physical form. Bhaskar writes with the clarity of someone who has genuinely discovered something, and the discovery is this: abundance is not the opportunity. Selection is. The gatekeepers didn't disappear when the internet arrived. We all became gatekeepers, and most of us are terrible at it. The book made me understand that having good taste isn't a nice-to-have -- it's the defining skill of the next decade. When AI can generate anything, the person who knows what to choose wins. I return to this book more than any other on the shelf.
The more complexity we encounter, the more simplification matters.
