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

Praise for Experience Curating

Experience Curatings implementation is a true working extension of the human brain.

Roderick Russell, NPR-featured speaker and iTunes Top 50 Podcaster

Joel created Experience Curating for people like me who want to remember, reference, and share memories, but dont want to spend hours journaling every night. My best memories are more valuable than ever with his framework... far easier than a stack of journals.

Betsy Talbot, author of Married with Luggage and Getting Rid of It

Joels entertaining, confident, and convincing, but also humble and open to learning more. He writes like a friend, holding my hand to simplify complex concepts.

Julie van de Zande, chief curator at The Global Sort

Do you have a leaky brain? I certainly do. Joels a systematizer and, if you want to banish your poor memory forever, get this book.

Amit Amin, positive psychology expert at HappierHuman

If youve ever kept a diary, used Evernote, joined Ancestry.com, or just created lists of stuff, then youre a curator too of experiences and information and will find this book useful. Experience Curating is the how-to manual that takes you from novice to ninja in easy steps with tons of resources and inspiration chucked in along the way.

Helen Crossley

Published by Personal Renaissance Press.

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

By Joel Zaslofsky

Copyright 2015 by Joel Zaslofsky

All Rights Reserved

Developmental Editor: Erin Kurup

Copy Editor: Samantha Eyler

Cover Design: Cornelia G. Murariu

Interior Design: Joel Zaslofsky

This book was self-published by the author, Joel Zaslofsky, under Personal Renaissance Press. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without the express permission of the author. This includes reprints, excerpts, photocopying, recording, or any future means of reproducing text.

If you would like to do any of the above, please seek permission first by contacting the author at http://valueofsimple.com/

Published in the United States by Personal Renaissance Press

Electronic version ISBN: 978-0-9912973-0-6

Print version ISBN: 978-0-9912973-1-3

Audio version ISBN: 978-0-9912973-2-0

Version 1.1

http://valueofsimple.com/ec-updates

Dedication

Im grateful to many people who helped make Experience Curating happen. But two special women deserve the bulk of the praise. First and foremost, my wife, Melinda, is the main reason this books exists. I never would have quit my corporate job and pursued the work that led to writing this book without her emotional, mental, financial, and other forms of support.

Second, I had the most amazing idea architect possible to make this text shine. Erin Kurup is more than an editor. Shes a good friend, refuses to let me do anything less than my best work, and knows how to write seriously funny comments in the margins. Erin did a masterful job in helping me turn my original 36,220 words of mostly crap into a legitimate, valuable book.

Last but not least, thanks to my mom and dad for teaming up to create me. Being born is an important prerequisite to crafting something worthwhile.

Contents

You cannot plant a 100-foot oak tree. You can only plant a seed and nurture it. Tyler Tervooren

I always wondered what it would be like to make my horribly leaky brain irrelevant. Wouldnt it be amazing to stop losing my best experiences, like a friends wedding or a fantastic TED Talk video, in a forgetful and corrupted void? My world could be so much better if I did something meaningful with great experiences instead of letting them drift away as my life seemed to be doing. Wouldnt it also be wonderful to break my self-made bubble of complacency and randomness? You wouldnt be reading this book if I hadnt gone searching for answers. But first, let me give you some context.

Back in April 2010, my wife Melinda and I had a nice house in a nice neighborhood with nice incomes supporting nice health and nice relationships. Things were... nice, at least on the outside. Then it happened: Melinda told me she was pregnant with our first son, Grant. Although expected, Melindas simple announcement ignited a personal renaissance my term for a rapid and expansive inner evolution thats still going strong.

Becoming a papa, I felt like a child walking into a bubble factory; a lot of things were about to go pop! After searching deep inside, I found an overwhelming need to build a meaningful legacy. There was this burning desire to directly help people being smothered by layers of corporate bureaucracy at work. But how could I impact peoples lives?

I realized I was suffocating inside from so much bottled-up creativity. The closer Grants due date got, the more I felt squeezed. It was simultaneously unbearable, overpowering, and exhilarating. These unsettling emotions mixed freely with the mirage that I was a thoughtful person and gave back to those who needed my help. The reality was that I was severely limited by self-destructive forces. For instance, I routinely played a video game called World of Warcraft until sunrise, a continuation of a twenty-year video game addiction. Sugar binging was as bad as video games if not worse. Put me in a room with anything sweet and Id devour it in a heartbeat. I had also worked a corporate job for almost a decade, achieving traditional success like six-figure compensation and a fancy job title. All that bought me was stress, fatigue, and the prospect of aimlessly drifting from one meaningless job to the next until I (hopefully) retired decades later. It took a while, but I realized that being someone elses employee was no longer for me.

So as an outlet for my dormant creative energy, I started a blog in November of 2010. I learned a ton, even though my horribly named and highly arbitrary Enlightened Resource Management website went nowhere. In the process, I also developed the infrastructure and awareness to transform my online presence into something truly useful, my Value of Simple website. And imagine this: the resources I created under Value of Simple like my Smart and Simple Matters podcast and the Continuous Creation Challenge were actually appreciated. Wow, I thought. So this is what it feels like to start a legacy.

Yet there was another internal force sprouting inside my personal renaissance. I downplayed it at first, observed it with skepticism, and misunderstood it for months. But eventually it materialized into something beautiful and too large to dismiss. Its become a personally powerful system and has helped many others simplify, focus, and overcome a poor memory. That force is what I call Experience Curating.

Of course, the system didnt come fully formed or ready to help me curate my existence. Instead, I wandered for months in the grey-matter wilderness, struggling to find a new vision. But my personal renaissances momentum eventually catapulted Experience Curating into prominence, like a boulder launched from a siege engine at a wall, on January 30, 2012. That was the day I resolved to put it in a spreadsheet.

It could be anything important and ended up being everything important. My love affair with spreadsheets specifically the Microsoft Excel kind rocketed to lofty new heights when I began using them to archive my best experiences. Personal reviews of recipes, books, music, and movies funneled into one spreadsheet. Any useful online content or profound quotes went into other spreadsheets. After about a year, I formalized the curating process that I follow to this day: FAOCAS. Pronounced focus, this acronym stands for Filter, Archive, Organize, C