Maria Popova

Brain-picker, noun: one who gathers information from another’s mind. It’s also a fitting digital alias for Maria Popova. Through her wildly popular blog and Maria curates and disseminates “eclectic interestingness from culture’s collective brain.” She reports, influences, and motivates with her findings. For many, Maria is the spark that ignites creativity. Her 10 ANSWERS below are no exception.

1. How would you describe your work in three words?
Curating eclectic interestingness.

2. Who is your creative role model?
I’m a big believer in creativity as a combinatorial force, driven by the ability to draw connections between different, cross-disciplinary concepts and ideas, putting these different pieces together into incredible new things. So I think this question should always be in the plural, calling for multiple, cross-disciplinary creative role models. Some of my ultimate heroes: John Maeda, Stephen Hawking, TED’s Chris Anderson, Philippe Starck, Gay Talese, Jonathan Harris, Janine Benyus, Susan Sontag.

But if I had to pinpoint a single person, just to be fair to the question, it would without a doubt be MoMA’s Paola Antonelli – precisely because she has a profound understanding of this combinatorial quality of creativity. I remember she once described herself as a “curious octopus” dabbling its tentacles in different disciplines that feed a single brain, and the description really stuck with me – what a perfect metaphor for how I’d like to live my life and approach my own work. Yes, I admit I have a massive culture-crush on Paola.

3. If you had an extra hour each day what would you do with it?
Meditate. After 25 years of skepticism and cynicism about it, certain events in my personal life made me turn to meditation and I am now a complete convert. I did some neuroscience in undergrad and remember all the fMRI studies about meditation and the brain, but I somehow never fully believed them.  It wasn’t until I started meditating daily that I began to feel the palpable, profound changes in my own chronically preoccupied brain that I really internalized what all the research had indicated. I wish I had an extra hour of meditation daily.

4. What place in the world most inspires you and why?
I grew up in Bulgaria and in the city of Varna on the Black Sea coast, there’s a big public park called The Sea Garden. Tucked away in one corner of it where hardly anyone goes is a tiny gazebo perched on a cliff, overlooking the bay. There’s nothing like sitting there at sundown, in the salty-sweet air and the fading light, with a soundtrack of seagulls and waves crashing – there’s a certain sense of connectedness to life and the universe, and I find this to be the greatest gate to the garden of creativity.

5. If you could do a different job for a day what would it be and why?
Bike messenger. I’m a sworn cyclist, having chosen to live my life without ever owning or operating a car, so I obviously really enjoy riding my bike. But more importantly, I’ve always been intrigued by the self-selectiveness of the types of people who choose to use a bike messenger over, say, a FedEx courier. So I’ve always had this irrational fantasy that they must be incredibly fascinating people who send send incredibly fascinating, unusual, romantic things – I’d love to know who they are and what they send. (Of course, they could be balding pot-bellied cheapskates who send piles of business documents and don’t want to pay for FedEx, but I choose to imagine otherwise.)

6. What is your favorite homemade gift to give?
I make these playful miniature robots out of colorful polymer clay. I always personalize them to reflect something about the person I’m making them for. But I’m also a huge music geek, so I think the delight a good, well-curated mixtape can inflict should never be underestimated – there’s something about the human touch of a friend who knows you well that will never be replicated by even the most sophisticated music-recommendation algorithms of today.

7. What is your favorite object in your home?
Well, I could give you a measured answer with an object that captures a combination of intelligence, eco-conscience, design sensibility and just the right amount of eccentricity, maybe something like those lovely coasters made out of recycled magazines I found in a tiny store in Oxford, or perhaps the vintage Brain Duster pill container with original tablets from 1910 that I recently bought on Etsy. Or, I could give you the honest, boring answer – my iPad. It’s true, I love holding it in my hands, I love looking at it in my DoDo Case, I love reading my Instapaper on it. Yes, I’m a cliche. But I think any object or product that manages to cater to the masses while still making people excited – in other words, that makes you okay with being a cliche – is a brilliant success.

8. What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
Cindy Gallop once told me, upon seeing me through a deeply heartbroken state, that the only way to move past a problem is to make absolutely sure you’ve done everything within your control –used every last weapon in your arsenal and gone to the craziest outer limits, which will often fall far outside your comfort zone – to solve it. That way, if you succeed, you are the master of your own success. And if you fail, you fail with grace and dignity and no regrets, eliminating the what-ifs that would otherwise haunt you for life. I think this is incredibly true, both in personal relationships and in creative or entrepreneurial challenges.

9. What websites do you use for inspiration?
I consume incredible amounts of information daily, everything from obscure academic journals to mainstream design blogs, so this is by no means a comprehensive list, but a few favorites: Swiss Miss, the brainchild of my friend Tina, a brilliant curator of design-and-oh-so-much-more; Open Culture, a treasure trove of free culture goodies, from vintage films to ebooks to online courses and a ton more; a recent favorite, Under Consideration’s Quipsologies blog, which is also – on an aside – a beautiful example of where web typography is headed; and Jason Kottke’s Kottke.org, though I do take issue with his chronic tendency to not give credit to his sources.

I think when you’re in the business of curation and content discovery is essentially your creative product, not giving credit to those who brought a piece of interestingness to your attention is the equivalent of plagiarism or even piracy in this new information economy. On the other end of the spectrum we have Tina and Open Culture’s Dan Colman, both of whom are absolutely meticulous about link love. I think as new information systems emerge, new systems of editorial ethics follow – and I believe it’s incredibly important to, whenever we can, recognize and honor them. (In fact, the BBC just altered the link guidelines for online articles, stressing that outbound links “are essential to online journalism.”)

10. When do you consider a piece of your work complete?
I don’t. The thing about information curation and, really, anything in the business of inspiration is that your creative output is just the starting point of someone else’s chain of creative associations, a building block of their creativity. It’s like a domino effect in which you only provide the first tile – you don’t know how the line will curve and where the dominoes will fall.

Forgive me for another Paola Antonelli reference, but whenever she curates an exhibition, she likes to leave the story unfinished, so that each viewer constructs his or her own subjective ending, extracts a unique message that is still framed by the curator’s thoughtful narrative but open to just the right amount of creative interpretation to make it widely relevant and engaging.

My work gives me completeness when I feel like I’ve found something worthy of being creative domino tile and I’ve shared it with my audience, or recognized a pattern that hints at a larger cultural conversation, but that doesn’t make it complete in the sense of being an end product. I’m in the business of staring points.