00:00:00 Thank you for joining me on episode 644 of the inspired stewardship podcast. This is Wendy Gentry from Baker university. I encourage you to live your life from the inside out. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott made her. So the key to using it productively is to know who is this for?
00:00:37 Who am I producing it for? Once you know that, then it's really hard to just waste time, because if you start looking at something and it doesn't fit for your specific audience, it's time to stop looking at it and move to the next thing. Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be,
00:01:02 then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's episode about investing in others through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about why curating for others has huge value,
00:01:37 how you can learn to actually be a curator and making sure you don't just waste time for yourself or others, but you actually do this in a productive way. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and one of the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible.
00:02:04 Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from, and you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast, curation or curating. It's kind of a funny little word.
00:02:37 And I will say that for a long time, I had only heard it in the use of like a museum curator, somebody that gathered a collection of artwork or gathered a collection of statues or took care of the material that came into the museum and arrange what would be displayed and how it would be displayed and all of these sorts of things. That was really the only use of the word that I knew whenever I was younger,
00:03:09 as I got older and got more into leadership and training and began to look into ways that others invest in others. I discovered this idea of curating content or curating knowledge. The idea that there are people who aren't necessarily themselves, an expert in an area, but what they're really good at is going out and finding information and bringing it together and packaging it in a way that makes it easy to understand and to access.
00:03:47 And that's the type of curation I want to talk about here. It's used a lot in the online business world, but honestly, this can happen any time. You're in a position where you want to influence others. One way of doing that one way of serving others and making an impact on others is through use spending the time and energy to curate a certain amount of knowledge,
00:04:17 to curate a certain amount of information. This means you go out and do the hard work of the research of vetting it and making sure that what you're sharing is accurate and true. It's not just about seeing a post or seeing something online or reading an article in a magazine or running across something and immediately sharing it with everyone. If that's what you've done,
00:04:40 if all you've done is read the headline and then you click share. That's not curating, that's broadcasting information, but curating actually involves the step of reading it, critically thinking about it, bouncing it against other ideas that you've heard and trying to vet the accuracy of the information in one way, shape or form. Now, again, you don't necessarily have to be an expert,
00:05:07 but you do have to be good at spotting. Whether or not information has a degree of accuracy. If you can do that, if that's a skill that you have, then there's incredible value and being the person that curates information for others, because the truth is that skill of finding and vetting information and then collecting it and putting it into a very easy to understand format.
00:05:38 It's not a skill that everyone has, and it has huge value because it's safe. He was tremendous amounts of time for those people that come across your collection and view it. It's a way of getting introduced to a concept very quickly. And it helps you when somebody else coming and wants to learn about that topic. Instead of having to do the work of reading 50 different places and gathering a whole bunch of information and looking at this article and then reading that magazine,
00:06:07 and then looking at this thing online, they can come to you. And if you're a trusted source, one that they know like and trust, and that you've done the hard work, then you've just saved them a huge amount of time. And any time you can save someone time, you've provided a value. And the truth is when you're thinking about curating,
00:06:30 what you want to do is find those topics that you love to learn about. Anyway, the thing that you're going to be doing, all of that research and that work, regardless, because it's something that you love, it's something that you're really interested in. It's something that you get a kick out of reading articles about. It's something that you have a passion for.
00:06:52 And as you do that, just take the extra step of sharing what you've discovered in a form that others can use. And again, that doesn't have to be online, but it certainly can be. It can be offline as well. I've always been sort of a curator of knowledge when I was in leadership and coaching roles, part of my job as a coach now,
00:07:14 and part of my job before, when I was in leadership was when people came with the problem wasn't necessarily knowing the solution to the problem, but it was being able to help them find where the information lived that would solve their problem. So instead of them having to do a whole bunch of research and waste a lot of time, they could kind of go to a one stop,
00:07:34 shop my job wasn't to know all the answers, but in some ways my job was to help people be able to find those answers very, very quickly now to do that too. One of the things that ends up happening to us a lot of times when we go down this road is we begin to guess gather knowledge for knowledge's sake, or at least certain types of personalities do because they love learning and they value knowledge.
00:08:00 It's very easy to allow your research to grow and grow and grow and grow beyond belief. And so the truth is to be using curation as a technique, as an a way of impacting others as a way of influencing others, as a way of serving others, there has to be an others involved. If all you're doing is gathering this information for yourself,
00:08:28 then it's all well and good. It may teach you something. You may be able to use that information, but you're not really curating it yet because you're not sharing it with an audience. You're not sharing it with anyone else. It's not impacting others to be using curation as a technique productively, you have to be focused on who who's the audience, who's it for?
00:08:51 How can I simplify this for those folks? Am I writing this for teenagers? Am I writing this for people who work for me? Am I writing this for a general audience online? Am I writing this for other coaches? Am I gathering this information? Who am I trying to impact? What do they look like? What are their emotions? What are their problems?
00:09:09 How do they feel? And then you begin to develop very targeted research because instead of having to look for everything, you're looking for the things that make an impact on the specific audience that you're trying to curate for. So the key to using it productively is to know who is this for? Who am I producing it for? Once you know that, then it's really hard to just waste time.
00:09:38 Because if you start looking at something and it doesn't fit for your specific audience, it's time to stop looking at it and move to the next thing. You've already curated because see curation is not just about what you include. It's also about what you exclude, what don't you share and why don't you share it. And you need to disclose that because it,
00:10:01 you know, it's not the goal is to not just not share something because of some internal bias, but to not share something, because it's not a value for your audience, but that's sometimes hard to know, but that's the real value in curation. That's the goal. That's what you're aiming for. So do you have an opportunity to provide value for others by being a curator?
00:10:24 And I would argue the answer is almost certainly yes. And that's one Avenue that you can use to really serve others and make an impact on the world. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively, listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling.
00:10:59 If you liked this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent. Or if you're in the U S you can text four, four, two, two, two talent tips, that's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time,
00:11:27 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence And impact the world.