Experience Curating: How to Gain Focus, Increase Influence, and Simplify Your Life

by Joel Zaslofsky

"Implementing Experience Curating is a true working extension of the human brain." - Roderick Russell


Imagine what would happen if you spent 0.1% of your time adding value to the other 99.9%. Picture an environment where your experiences don't just happen to you, but are used to make big things happen for you.


Could you harness an otherwise overwhelming world of endless information, gratifying moments, and dizzying possibilities? How much social currency could you create if you knew how to capture, organize, and share anything to improve everything?


The open secret is that curating your entire existence - or Experience Curating as rising author Joel Zaslofsky calls it - is just as powerful today as it was 2,000 years ago.


Experience Curating isn't just about Zaslofsky's unique FAOCAS framework and how to reap its rewards with your favorite tools. It's a three-part blueprint to achieve your own brand of success, complete with real-world case studies from Evernote, The Huffington Post, and even the Brothers Grimm.


Through Experience Curating, you'll learn how to embrace your curating gifts


1) Simplify your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual landscape.
2) Enjoy faster, tastier, and healthier food.
3) Become an expert and go-to community resource in any topic.
4) Gain more freedom by breaking out of the Internet's "filter bubbles."


What you use your curated experiences for - making money or personal finance mastery, improving your relationships, truly useful to-do lists, or world domination (for instance) - is up to you.


You can join countless others to push the boundaries of your potential. You can constantly prove that your existence is meaningful. And you can unearth the timeless and specific steps to convert your curating currency into social, intellectual, or physical capital.


All it takes is some simple and intentional Experience Curating.

Genres: Nonfiction, Self Help, Business, Personal Development

168 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 15, 2014

Reviews

[Bakari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before reading Joel's book, I didn't know my habit of keeping an annual list of books I read is an example of curating. I always thought curating had to do with art and book collections. But the way Joel explains it, the annual family portraits I take, my iTunes smart list collection of favorite jazz songs, and the two books of tweets I had published are also examples curating my life experience.

As Joel explains it, curating is about recognizing, capturing, organizing, and sharing our most valuable moments. And thanks to digital technology, curating our life experiences is much easier, and efficient now. His book also made me realize how I rely onTwitter or Google+ contacts and RSS feed apps for curated information on certain topics.

Joel describes using spreadsheets to document his life collections, but after reading his book, I would say that tagging entries in my Day One digital journal is another way I curate my experiences. With my tagged journal entries (e.g., about books, individual family members, jazz artists and albums, work, and other topics), I can filter and export them to PDFs or printed books. I've even started tagging journal entries about the meals I eat, for the purposes of developing better eating habits.

I wish I had been aware of curating experiences when my children were younger. There's so many details in life that slip our mind as the years pass along. And as Joel points out, curating helps us see what we truly value. "It helps us get more of the good stuff, and protects us from the distractions."

I think Joel does a great job explaining what curating is, and how it can be useful. His writing style is congenial, and his conviction about the subject is evident on every page. The book can be read in less than a day, and I think it will help you to see how you're probably already curating stuff in your life, and how your curations can be more useful and meaningful. The only part I felt missing in this book is maybe including a list of ideas for curating life experiences. Joel provides a few ideas based on his and a few others' experiences, but I'm sure there are at least a hundred ideas that readers may not realize. Perhaps a follow-up book could provide numerous examples of how different people curate their life experiences and what tools they use to do so.

"Experience Curating" may seem a little right brain or geeky for some people, but it's definitely an practice that more people should engage in, especially with the various digital apps and online services that can automate some curating tasks.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a long term reader of Joel's blog, Value of Simple, although haven't really understood this curating thing he keeps going on about... until now! Joel succinctly but comprehensively provides you with the WHY and HOW of curating your life (either specific parts or all of it).

And don't be put off by the word curate - by the end of the first chapter you'll feel like you're talking to an old friend who's really enthusiastic about this thing he claims is improving his entire life, and you'll soon be a convert. Less than half way through and I had already caught the experience curating bug.

I'm new to the world of curating, but it it's clear to see that Experience Curating is set to be an invaluable resource to both new and experienced curators alike for many years to come.

[Rita Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of words but not enough example

I am not sure but perhaps this is one of the cases when a picture is worth a thousand words. I got the jist of what he was trying to explain ,but felt the whole picture was just outside my grasp. I think perhaps I will research this more, so it was interesting enough to capture my attention. It needs more example and less repetition.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting start in planting some ideas but a bit vague about implementation. I would have liked to see more screen shots.

[Kariann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm quoted in it!

[Hayley Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Experience Curating is an interesting concept that I think has a lot of merit, but also a lot of potential downsides and, at least the way the author presents it, seems overwhelming.

My main complaint with this book is definitely that it felt slow and dragged on, and I feel it could have been far shorter while still covering all the content that it did.

Experience curating seems to have a lot of benefit for helping someone slow down to think about their life and experiences, be a bit more critical about what truly brings them value and what doesn't, and to *curate* your life to be what you want it. The author's system of experience curating, however, involves logging snippets or pieces of most of life's experiences in a spreadsheet. While obviously not impossible, as he does it and has a system which he shares in detail, I feel that would take away so much time from living and loving life to log it instead.

Experience curating is not for me. While I think I could benefit from some different version of slowing down and simplifying life, this book is not the tool that I'm looking for.

[Abbie Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the concept of experience curating and am interested to give it a go in my own life. I feel like this book really explains the what, why, when, who etc but lacks on the how. There are explanations that can be a little repetitive as to how to practice experience curating but I still am left feeling like I don't really know where to start or what it should look like via excel or any other frequently mentioned curating platform. I've had a look on his website but found that it seemed to take me in circles and there weren't many example spreadsheets to help me learn from, and those I could find were a bit irrelevant to the topics the book mentions. Perhaps I'm missing something on the blog? Regardless, if I have to search for it online then I feel it's something that should have been covered in the book itself.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best thing about this book is probably the title. But it is a truly great title.

Zaslofsky loves spreadsheets, and this book teaches readers how to curate our experiences. While the book starts as a strategy to organize our lived experiences into meaningful categories, as the book progresses, it starts to become - putting it into my language - preparing the Goffmanesque frontstage for social media influence. So our 'stuff' is organized for a corporatized personal brand.

There are fine arguments about the proliferation of information and need to manage, shape and control it. That has been the focus of information literacy scholars for forty years. But the attention to digital curation is welcome.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually go for self-help type books, and this title is touted as such. That said, this is no ordinary self-help book, in that it is simply offering a way to aggregate important information which will simplify many aspects of life, depending on the desired outcome. As an Archivist/Librarian, I found the techniques covered here to be interesting, and easily doable. In fact, I plan on starting my own spreadsheet in order to archive a couple of my life-long interests. I recommend this book to anyone who would like to gain control over information that is important to them.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the energy that bursts out of every page in this book. I started reading thinking curating might be a dry topic, but I was hooked very quickly, laughed a lot, and popped out a curating convert. Whether you have a question, curiosity, or burning desire to curate, this book has to be closest thing to a definitive and inspirational manual. Experience Curating is a great system for heightening the meaning and value of experiences for yourself and others – all delivered with incredibly thorough, yet simple detail

[Mark Boszko · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just awful. A six bullet point blog post expanded to book form. Rambling, incoherent, sophomoric, overwrought, and fixated on the "discovery" of using a spreadsheet as a database. Guess I won't be trusting the recommendations of the blog that I saw this on anymore.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really just looking for ideas on organizing things for my own benefit; I probably won't be sharing that much online. But this book gave me some good ideas, particularly on ways to use Excel.

[Anick Globensky-bromow · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author uses slang a bit too much, I had a hard time understanding the book because of that. He means to be funny, but it's quite distracting.

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interessanter Blick auf das aktive Gestalten und technische Unterstützen des eigenen Gedächtnis.