“Curating it” is the new “Crushing it” in tech

Curation can be more than cable-free flat lays.

“Yeah man, we’re crushing it,” he says with serious emphasis.

I’m still jet-lagged at the time and as much as I’m trying to stay focused on the conversation, my mind is already clocking out a little. A combination of the immense amount of things I need to attend to on my pit stop back in Australia and some natural aversion to the bravado.

Not that it’s the person but the language. Through the haze of a confused body clock I refocus on the conversation but park the “crushing it” to think about later.

Why do we need to crush it?

If anything I’ve observed in my own journey as a founder, it’s been one of careful disassembly of the more unhealthy habits of startup culture. And that includes both the genuine culture (people with similar aspirations and similar challenges) and the manufactured culture (the machinery of optimising venture capital returns and the signals that are created to enforce this).

In other words, I’ve been guilty of “crushing it” too. We all have.

Crush it 10X, bro.

Which is probably why hearing people use this language feels so strange. There’s a lot of truth the Buddhist ideas about repulsion — when we react strongly to an outlier situation or person it’s because we recognise even the trace element of that inside ourselves.

Which is to say that every startup in the ecosystem is guilty of “crushing it” sometimes. It’s not just that we’re full of hot air — it’s actually what it takes sometimes to get a company up on the launchpad long enough to build the engine to send it rocketing into space.

Or insert your choice of motivational poster analogy.

This is the uncomfortable truth of being a founder — it’s not just the technical and business skills that creates companies. It’s the willingness to break social conventions and verge into socially awkward territory to shorten the distance between potential and reality.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t also shorten the distance to being a little more human in the process.

How can we curate it instead?

My proposal is that we swap “crushing it” for “curating it”.

The idea is that this small semantic shift creates a much larger cultural shift — effectively moving the lens off of ourselves and onto the insights and passions we have for external areas of the ecosystem.

Think of any given tech meetup. Imagine how much more valuable it would be to sidestep the personal narratives and instead focus on sharing the nuanced insights that we have as founders that live and fight and die in the trenches of tech culture and (dare I say it) disruption (sorry).

Much of our solo journeys are ones of all four seasons of genuine excitement, praise-worthy progress, frustrated resilience and even crippling self-doubt. Of course we’re going to drop narratives of “crushing it” given the entire ecosystem is primed to maximise the expectations of a bunch of ordinary humans to step into the roles of world-conquering superstars.

So I’m suggesting something a little more useful to others and kind to ourselves.

Curation is a translation of common experience into the nuance of culture.

I’m jacking Stephenson a little in that definition, but it holds up. Curation is not only an art that takes specific skill but a constant of cultural progress.

Look at television. Many of us grew up with somewhere between two and four television channels, and made do with enjoying the better of what was supplied.

These days we have unlimited content on Netflix and Amazon Prime and Youtube. But the cognitive load of engaging it is enormous — the paradox of choice can be overwhelming. So we create a market for curators to build brands as a trusted voice in a certain vertical.

The cycle is useful to understand. Limited origins lead to limitless abundance and then inevitably evolve into curated subsets. This curation is what we then call “culture”. Life is fractal like that, and all progress relies on this flow.

Not to get too deep, but isn’t that what we’re doing in the startup ecosystem? Creating a positive culture for people to undertake high risk (ad)ventures in search of repeatable business models? And giving them the sub-reddits of life to be unique humans even when using similar methodologies to build companies?

In other words, I don’t even own a hoodie. But my company still ships code. #amidoingitright?

Becoming a curation culture

The first step is gently retraining each other. The next time a conversation partner talks about how much they are crushing it, how about asking them what books or resources they’ve found valuable recently?

How about taking a bigger risk and sharing something you’ve struggled with recently and ask if they’ve ever experienced similar?

Or some other nuance or insight that can actually build more value than paving over our cultural insecurities with the manufactured signals of actors in our ecosystem that don’t care about us as humans. Cue any give DHH article here.

And we can start now. Instead of asking you to click the green heart, like all Medium posts now seem to do, I’d rather you go and ask someone in your network what their top ten books are? Or gather a group of founders with the purpose of sharing one hardship encountered that week. Or just, you know, line up all your Apple products for a perfect flat lay photo. Even that would be better and more meditative than “crushing it”, bro.

Thanks for reading. I’ve set myself a personal challenge of writing and publishing daily for the month of March. Partly as an exercise in lean writing and partly to explore the impact of contributing these quick and raw narratives. This was day two’s post — what did you think?