Inspiration via Brain Pickings


Oscar Wilde once said, “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” The first part is good advice for the day of your presentation, but the second part is a good thing to keep in mind every day. This thing we call the Internet offers a quick and affordable way to keeping learning and feeling inspired without paying thousands for higher education and its syllabuses, professors and grades.

A particularly educational website is Brain Pickings. It is a forum built for inspiration, and rarely does a website encompass so much. Maria Papova curates the site, and she does a masterful job of collecting and disseminating fascinating tidbits of information to her enthusiastic audience.

“Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know were interested in until you are,” Papova writes on the About page.

Forget dropping thousands of dollars on a liberal arts degree, Papova has got your curriculum covered on Brain Pickings. An assortment of ideas, insights and information, it’s a much-needed haven for the creative-minded. And when you’re thinking of ideas for an upcoming presentation or you’re brainstorming ways to tell a great story, it’s a great resource for instant inspiration.

Pieces on Brain Pickings range from “Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck” to “Introducing the Curator’s Code: A Standard for Honoring Attribution of Discovery Across the Web” to “The Laws of Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science.” There’s something for everyone, and with a little luck, you’ll find something that sparks your curiosity or something that sends your thinking in another direction.

The act of feeling inspired is a wholly personal experience, and it is an absolutely essential one. We’ve all seen television shows and movies with the frustrated artist who is lacking inspiration; he tends to be nearly destroyed by its absence. It may be called other things– muse, vision, revelation– but by whatever name, it is essential for creating compelling, impactful material. If your presentation lacks creativity, your audience will lack the inspiration needed to take action.

Assemble an arsenal of websites and blogs that you find inspirational so you can refer to them when you need a quick dose. Brain Pickings offers a great, highly varied melody of information, and it also has a column on titled The Year in Reading with ‘Best of’ book lists, so you can keep the inspiration going with a book.

“The more of these [inspirational] building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become,” writes Papova. Indeed, the information and knowledge we consume becomes part of us, and we, in turn, make it our own and shape it how we like. The more inspiration you take in, the more inspirational your own material will become.

So the next time you find yourself working on a particularly dull presentation on a particularly dreary workday, hop onto Brain Pickings and discover something inspirational. Your presentation will be better because of it, and maybe you’ll become a little bit more educated, too.





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