Curate your feed

FYI: Every Friday in July I’ll be taking your calls. If you have a question or just want to catch up book it here. Today I’ll be chatting with Mel and Paula.

My friend Justin Espejo wrote in his upcoming book:

Imagine only eating one kind of food every day. Not only would you miss out on all the other important nutrients your body needs, but you’d also grow tired of the monotony. Similarly, consuming the same types of content can limit your creativity and leave you uninspired.

Which made me think about how and when I curate what I consume.

My most active curation happens on TikTok. Because I know that if you’re not vigilant about it the fyp fills up with boobs and machines. Catering to the lowest common interests and making it brain rot central.

But building a habit of aggressively swiping away anything in those categories has created an environment of micro learning for me. Full of AI-prompts, mixed media inspiration and some memes.

The second thing I do is to tell a few close friends to send me “good” content. That really helps in discovering topics and people I would never find on my own. If it vibes, the algorithms are smart enough to take me deeper in that rabbit hole.

If only YouTube had messaging build in …

Since most of my YouTube consumption happens on a computer the easiest way to curate what I watch there is by having multiple accounts for very specific interests. It’s almost like having different TV channels to zap through 😅

It not only helps you choose what to watch intentionally but it also gives you a multi faceted view at how different YouTube can look for different people.

Some videos show up across the board as they become viral outliers or cater to a large general audience but others are hyper niche and will never bleed over into other accounts.

Like I’m still waiting for a D&D video to show up in my personal development account.

All that is to say that what you consume shapes what you’ll create.

As Creators we have to be very mindful of it, because it’s all too easy to continuously emulate someone who originally inspired us to create instead of developing our own voice for the current timeline.

You can go deeper on Justin’s mindset to stand out online in our conversation.

💛 Valentin

PS: I’ll be in NYC on Sept 4th for Press Publish NYC. Let me know if you’re around.