The Superpower of Curation

In this Draft, writer and House of Beautiful Business co-founder and lead curator Tim Leberecht makes the case for curation as an essential skill for navigating our messy times—and shares his three most important curatorial principles.

Life is made up of small moments, the cliché goes—and I’m acutely aware of each one. Before I fall asleep, consciously or not, I replay the day’s moments in my mind, reflecting on what made them memorable. It’s a deformation professionnelle. Throughout the day, I create and collect moments. My work is filled with emails and meetings, all in service of a single aim: to craft a day like no other, made up of a string of experiences I’ve carefully designed.

I’m a curator. And curation—the intentional selection and assembly of ideas, objects, and talent for others—was my first love, though I didn’t have the word for it then and only recently began thinking of it as a craft.

At ten, I founded my own make-believe football club. I created the emblem, the mascot, the jerseys, the squad lists. I made bold acquisitions on the player transfer market.

When I outgrew the club, my focus shifted to a publishing company that, despite its humble beginnings on the bottom bunk of my bedroom, quickly evolved into a media empire complete with a magazine and a TV show. I planned radio programs (with my poor younger brother as the sole listener), produced movies, staged exhibitions, and hosted conferences—all imaginary.

As a teenager, I curated mixtapes for girls I liked. I made lists—for books, cities, albums—and shared them with friends.

Today I curate conferences, dinners, learning journeys, and publications—including the one you’re reading. The thinkers and changemakers featured in the Pullman Drafts series are all members of the House of Beautiful Business, the global community I co-founded. We host an annual festival, local events around the world, and publish a weekly newsletter and occasional reports. We also help Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits create experiences that are both unforgettable and transformative.

Curation is our superpower.

And I still can’t believe how lucky I am to do what I love for a living: bringing people and ideas together, arranging what belongs—or doesn’t belong—side by side. Creating scene after scene, challenging or even teasing the audience. Giving them what they want—or what they don’t want, or didn’t know they wanted.

“Curation is one inch away from comfort,” digital anthropologist Matt Klein told me, whom I curated for this series.

These days, I’m one of millions. Everyone, it seems, is a curator. What was once an elite designation, reserved for globe-trotting art-world impresarios like Hans-Ulrich Obrist, is now claimed by anyone compiling content on social media.

To say the term has been democratized is an understatement—it’s been flattened, branded, and commodified. With every influencer, tastemaker, content creator, conference organizer, and self-styled “life designer” calling themselves a curator, it’s no surprise the word has made lists of the year’s worst. Comedian Stewart Lee once joked that “curator” sounds like “somebody stirring turds in a toilet bowl with a stick.”

Curation has also been co-opted by marketers eager to lend their brands a veneer of taste and exclusivity. From luxury labels and hotels to airlines and business schools, “curated experiences” and “curated communities” abound.

Yet it’s ironic that the word is now used so carelessly, given its etymological roots in the Latin curare—“to take care of.” In ancient Rome, curators were caretakers of estates, interiors, gardens, and art collections. This origin reminds us of the true ethos of curation: the act of selecting, organizing, and assembling—with great care—a collection that offers coherence, continuity, and meaning.

In a world increasingly defined by noise, curation is more essential than ever. Reclaimed from both the art elite and the algorithmic feed, curation can be a powerful remedy for some of today’s most pervasive ills.

Start with information overload. At work, we’re bombarded by emails, messages, and notifications. At home, our devices chime endlessly, distracting us from family, hobbies, meals, friendships—the fabric of a rich life.

Worse still, every corner of our lives has been infected by a transactional mindset, reducing human relationships to quid pro quo. We long for meaning, and this longing often expresses itself as a craving for quality: quality time, quality relationships, quality experiences, quality work.

Curation can be a holdout in this sea of sameness and distraction. It cuts through the excess. In an economy that fracks our most precious resource—attention—curation ensures it is spent wisely. Amid a world that is at once too complex and too simplistic, curation is the art of selecting what truly matters.

It offers agency—or at least the illusion of it—in an age of technological determinism. It is the heart of an attention economy that dares to care.

So how do you curate well?

It begins with saying no—with what gathering expert Priya Parker calls “benevolent exclusion”: the discipline to omit what is not essential, and to do so kindly but firmly.

Think of Sven Marquardt, the notoriously strict bouncer of Berlin’s Berghain techno club. Every night, he creates the Berghain experience by deciding who’s in and who’s out. That’s curation. In our own lives, the quality of our experiences is similarly shaped by whom we let in, what we give our attention to—and what we don’t.

In business, as in life, strategy is as much about what you won’t do as what you will. The Romantic poets called this “negative capability,” a concept leadership philosopher Steven D’Souza champions in his recent book Shadows at Work. For D’Souza, embracing the invisible and hidden—the shadow side—makes leaders more human and authentic, particularly in a time obsessed with phony, sometimes toxic, positivity.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips goes further: “Nothing is more important than what never happened,” he once wrote. This, too, is a curator’s mantra: to create something meaningful, you must know what to leave out. The unseen often matters more than what is on display.

Curation means to look more closely, to go deeper, and to draw lines more firmly.

But once you do decide to say yes, it should be a hell yes. A curator must be enamored—with an idea, an object, a person. You must be so excited, so moved, so intrigued that you cannot help but share it.

Curation is a practice of intimacy. It requires developing a real relationship with the thing or person you are presenting. You must spend time with it, reflect on it, feel joy with it—or be wounded by it.

Bruno Giussani, former TED curator and another voice in this series, told me he often meets with speakers multiple times, sometimes a dozen, before their talk. He wants to know them, not just parrot their ideas.

Of course, most of the curation we now experience is automated—powered by algorithmic recommendation engines. Our playlists, shopping carts, news feeds are all “curated” by machines. In galleries, we show our appreciation through time and attention; online, it’s through clicks and likes. Automated curation is hyper-personalized, but it only reflects what we already wanted—or what people like us wanted.

Human curation, by contrast, has a point of view. It can provoke. It can surprise. It might irritate. It doesn’t aim to please; it aims to move.

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, legendary music producer Rick Rubin exclaimed: “The audience comes last.” Cooper was surprised: “Why?” “Because the audience only knows what came before,” Rubin said. 

Human curators are flawed and biased. But at their best, they draw from lived experience, moral imagination, and intuition. They dare to defy the data, to go against the grain, to be the lone dissenting voice in a room full of consensus.

They say no. They say hell yes. And they defend their choices—gently, but fiercely.

Curation has gone from practical to elitist, from ubiquitous to automated. It is now everything, everywhere, all at once.

And so, it too must be curated.

If we remove it from the ivory tower, disentangle it from (self-)marketing, and distinguish it from algorithmic mimicry, we can reclaim curation as a deeply human act—and an essential skill for anyone who seeks to find the sacred in the profane, meaning amid the chaos, and a life that is not only more productive, but also more beautiful.

Curation is the superpower of those who truly care.

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I’ll leave you with my three simple curatorial rules:

Say No

Practice benevolent exclusion. Only by saying no can your yes have meaning.

Make Your Yes a “Hell Yes”

Take the time to build intimacy with the idea, person, or object. Share only what moves you deeply.

Have Guts

Muster the courage to see what others—and algorithms—overlook. Defend your choices, especially when they go against the grain.