To get this post started, I had to do a little word sleuthing. I want to talk about the intersection of curation and creation, so I was looking for the adjective form of curation. I knew it wasn't curative, I discovered it wasn't curatory, and curational just sounded bad. Fortunately, I stumbled upon curatorial.
Fascinating, right? Well, I do like to get me words proper-like...
Anyway, here is today's deep thought: there is often great value in assembling existing thoughts into a coherent, consumable form.
I just ordered and received a copy of The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen. Not for the first time when reading reviews of product/growth/marketing books, I saw a few comments along the lines of "this is old stuff" or "you can find all of this on the web." Notwithstanding the fact that "old" might mean 2 years ago in internet-time, these comments may well be true. But I think they miss the point.
Granted, I've just started The Lean Product Playbook, so take my comments with a grain of salt. That said, my initial impression is that Olsen has done a good job of collecting up a lot of practical knowledge around lean startup practices and presenting it in a very clean, organized, and actionable manner. Do I really want to go around reading a bunch of different content on the web, then synthesize it myself, when someone has gone to great effort to do that for me?
Bite-sized content clearly has its place. So does long-form content that synthesizes and clearly expresses interesting ideas. The latter is more difficult to produce, more scarce, and generally more valuable (which is why I'm willing to shell out $20+ for it). Even if information still does want to be free, synthesis wants to be valued.
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