How Can Everyone Leave Their Knowledge and Experiences for Future Generations?
“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” — Otto Von Bismarck
After a burst of inspiration, it took Einstein 5 weeks to develop the theory of relativity. If he were alive in today’s era of curator economy, however, it would’ve taken less. Less time, less research. Overall, fewer headaches.
Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell paved the way for Einstein’s spark of genius, as well as a variety of other authors. While their works are already a part of Einstein’s personal selection, imagine if the knowledge gathered from all of them was filtered further. Imagine if those guys had left only the crème de la crème of their insights and passages to posterity, highlighting what’s even more important than important.
That’s exactly what the curator economy is about: turning meaningful content into distilled knowledge for future generations.
How Content Curation Could Help Everyone Leave Something Meaningful
Creating for the sake of it is no longer worth it. Average content doesn’t break past the highest level of sophistication, nor does it hold people’s already shrunk attention span for too long. Today is all about differentiators. And although Lavoisier said “nothing is created and nothing is destroyed but everything is transformed”, we can still create something relatively original out of previous concepts.
But here’s where it gets tricky:
You could create and share a stellar piece of content. Unless it blows up, it’ll possibly be swallowed by mounds of latest, often less relevant content (ahem, Twitter and Instagram). People don’t seem to learn that what’s new may entertain you, but what’s relevant edifies you.
Now, let’s flip the coin.
What would the world look like if everyone only left remarkable content behind? If we could, somehow, peek into someone else’s learning processes? If we could learn what inspired them to create that thing, and what led them to that a-ha moment? What articles did they read? What videos did they watch?
Spoiler alert: it would make the learning process easier, faster, and more interesting for everyone. It would save us time. It would mean more focused work and fewer hours of guessing, looking, finding (or not finding).
We rarely have access to the ideas that move people to create something life-changing. We only have access to the finished product. Unless, of course, they share those ideas with you — and a social highlighter (or web highlighter) could make that happen.
The smart content curation a web highlighter provides could push both the human race and the technological boundaries forward. After all, collective knowledge is how humans get increasingly smarter since the beginning of time. If each one of us had our own assemblage of meaningful content, this could change the world as we know it.
Come on, wouldn’t you want to pay a visit to the minds of those you admire?
Having a social network that welcomes us into other people’s highlights would help us with two essential things:
- Avoiding and learning from the mistakes other people have bumped into, creating a focused learning path for ourselves.
- Looking through other people’s arsenal of knowledge, then grabbing an idea or two to help our process.
Leave Your Learnings to Future Generations. Starting Now.
People’s personal highlights are the closest you’ll get to being inside their brains. And when you get such a chance, you’d better seize it.
At Glasp, we’re a community where people blazing in their industries gather and leave a utilitarian legacy for future generations. If you’re looking for a truly edifying social network where relevance overpowers updates, this is your community. Join us today, and start collecting the web.
Cheers,
Kazuki
