I write this newsletter for emerging experts, consultants and advisors who are looking to increase their visibility, authority and trust in the eyes of their prospective customers. I write for independents, people who want to make a business out of their personal know-how even if they’re not great writers and do not have big digital-age credentials.
What I have been practicing since I was a kid, is how to create value through mindful organization and re-framing of what’s already available. Someone who can make a good fruit salad out of existing ideas, resources, tools.
What I do is to assist true passionate micro-experts become trusted guides, go-to persons in their field of work. I do this by: a) becoming a discovery agent for them, b) highlighting and contextualizing other people’s great work they should be paying attention to, c) creating collections, libraries, catalogs that repeatedly support their goals.
To learn together, how you can do this yourself, subscribe or get in touch.
In this issue:
Traditional thought leadership tried to win attention and respect through novelty and originality.
To be seen as a trusted authority in your field, without having to write original essays or claim superiority, the Bowerbird Method gives you a concrete, counterintuitive mechanism: organize what already exists, and your judgment reveals itself automatically.
The bowerbird method wins over novelty and originality by showing a) breadth of understanding and b) making patterns visible.
In a world where AI can generate endless variations of ideas, the ability to recognize and highlight key patterns, how they interact, different and complement each other, becomes undoubtedly a scarce and valuable skill.
When you cluster similar things together, the differences between them become visible and that act of organized comparison is itself a powerful, unfakeable proof of expertise.
Advice: Cluster similar options so the differences become visible, then explain those differences with your criteria. That’s how you prove judgment, pattern recognition, and real domain familiarity, without claiming uniqueness. It turns you into a “map-maker” people trust when choices are confusing.
Table of Contents
3) Why Doing This Builds Trust
4) The Meta-Curator’s Advantage
6) How to Apply This: A Simple Approach
7) Why Using The Bowerbird Method Builds Trust
1) Curate To Mate
Not many know the story of this unique good-looking bird, that curates with objects and color, to conquer the attention and love of his future mate.
What makes its behavior particularly fascinating is not just what it does, but what it reveals about how for an expert taste (quality) and competence (expertise) can be effectively demonstrated especially when the options look very similar.
In the rainforests along Australia’s eastern coast, male satin bowerbirds spend their days engaged in what appears to be an obsessive collecting ritual. These birds, with their glossy blue-black plumage and bright blue eyes, have developed one of the most elaborate courtship displays in the animal kingdom.
The male satin bowerbird builds a structure called an avenue bower. This is not a nest. It’s more of an arch of entrance, a narrow corridor. It then begins decorating the area in front of his bower with objects. Not just any objects. Blue objects only. Blue feathers from parrots. Blue flowers. Blue berries. Blue bottle caps. Blue pen lids. Blue plastic fragments. Blue shells. Anything blue he can find, natural or human-made, gets collected and carefully arranged in the space in front of his avenue bower.
Research by Gerald Borgia at the University of Maryland (see references), spanning decades of observation and thousands of hours of video recordings, has documented this behavior in extraordinary detail. What the researchers found challenges many assumptions about how display and expertise work.
This is how it goes: The female bowerbirds tour a number of bowers in their area before choosing a mate. They visit the bowers when males are away to inspect the structures and return when males are present to watch their courtship displays.
During these visits, females are not evaluating any single blue object for its rarity or individual quality. They are evaluating the collection as a whole. The coherence. The commitment to the theme. The consistency of the display.
Male bowerbirds with more blue decorations, particularly those who maintain clean, well-organized collections, achieve higher mating success.
[It’s interesting to understand also the role of the bower itself, which, with his narrow passage construct, serves an important function that seems to be not merely decorative.
By requiring the male to move around a physical barrier to approach the female, the bower gives the female the opportunity to admire the bowerbird curated displays without being forced into mating before she is ready. The bower is a kind of special protected viewing balcony from which to admire the bowerbird’s detailed artwork.]
But here is where the research reveals something non-obvious about how evaluation works.
The female is not just counting blue objects. She is assessing something more subtle. The clustering of similar blues creates a framework where subtle differences become visible and meaningful.
When many similar blue objects are clustered together in one location, strange but true, their individual differences become more apparent. That blue feather has a metallic sheen. That blue bottle cap is matte. This blue flower reflects light differently. Those blue shells have texture variations.
The differences become apparent precisely because the similarities are so consistent. And that’s what she prizes.
The collection creates a framework where differences can be evaluated.
According to the multi-decade research work by Dr Borgia, females prefer to mate with bowerbird males with more coherent, well-maintained collections. And the specific quality being sought by females is not the rare, beautiful treasure, but the demonstration of consistent judgment across many similar choices.
The bowerbird understands something that applies directly to how experts build credibility.
When you bring together many similar things, you are not creating redundancy. You are creating a playground where differences become opportunities for deeper understanding.
2) The Curation Paradox
There is a paradox hidden in the bowerbird’s behavior that is of pedagogical value to content curators or to any expert consultant wanting to build credibility and trust. When you collect similar items together, you assume you are emphasizing their sameness. But this is not what happens in the brain of someone evaluating your collection.
Research in cognitive psychology shows that when similar items are grouped together, people become significantly better at discriminating between them. Our brains automatically start comparing similar objects to detect subtle variations. The similarity creates the context. The differences within that context become the signal. Without the clustering, those very differences might become completely invisible.
Think about wine tasting. If you taste five completely different beverages across a week, a red wine, a white wine, orange juice, coffee, water, you learn very little about wine. But if you taste five similar red wines from the same region in one sitting, suddenly you can detect differences in tannin structure, acidity levels, and fruit character that you would have not been able to notice otherwise.
The similarity is what makes the differences learnable.
When you curate five different approaches, strategies, methods that all claim to help people create higher value content, you are not confusing your audience with too many options. You are demonstrating that you know the landscape deeply enough to identify ten viable solutions, you understand the subtle differences between them, you have experience with enough approaches to evaluate trade-offs, and you can help people choose based on their specific needs rather than imposing your personal preference.
The clustering of similar options proves expertise in a way that recommending a single best solution cannot.
Anyone can have one good recommendation. But when you can organize multiple similar solutions and explain the subtle differences between them, you are revealing a depth of knowledge that shows your true competence and which cannot be easily faked.
3) Why Doing This Builds Trust
Most experts try to build authority by claiming uniqueness. They position themselves as having the solution, the better system, the definitive framework, the ultimate strategy, methodology, approach.
But, given what I see around me, it looks as if this is a rapidly outdating editorial strategy today. It made sense in a world where information was scarce and expertise was hard to verify.
But we no longer live in that world. In this new context, a different model of authority has already started to emerge. One based not on claiming uniqueness but on demonstrating comprehensive understanding.
When you create a collection of five similar approaches that solve a specific problem and explain when each one works best, you are signalling several things that build trust:
You have invested time exploring the landscape.
You have developed evaluation criteria beyond surface features.
You understand that context matters and different situations require different approaches. You are not trying to force everyone into your solution but helping people find what fits their specific situation.
Research on building trust shows that people do rely much more on those who help them make informed decisions than on those who simply tell them what to do.
When someone helps you understand options and trade-offs, they are treating you as someone who can decide on his own. When instead someone just tells you their answer is best, they are asking you to trust their judgment over your own.
The bowerbird method embeds this trust-building mechanism into the structure of what you curate.
By bringing together similar options, you are tacitly saying here are the viable approaches, here are the meaningful differences, here is how to think about which one fits your situation.
4) The Meta-Curator’s Advantage
Interestingly enough, truly understanding and using the bowerbird method opens even greater authority and credibility-building opportunities for those who are taking on the role of meta-curators.
Here’s the difference:
A primary curator collects and shares individual items they find valuable. A new strategy, a set of prompts, an analysis of an issue.
A meta-curator does something different. They bring together the collections of multiple primary curators to reveal patterns that are invisible when those items are scattered.
Consider what happens when you follow 15 different growth-marketing or monetization experts.
Over a month, you see perhaps close to a hundred individual recommendations, tips, insights, strategies and tactics scattered across your feed at different days and times. But they are all disconnected and isolated. You have no framework for understanding how they relate to each other, or whether they compete, complement, or contradict each other.
Now imagine someone who brings together that one hundred recommendations into thematic groups. Strategies for building trust before monetizing. Tactics to make fast, immediate sales. Other ones to build strong loyalty before even showing your product.
Suddenly you can see patterns that were invisible before. Which approaches get recommended repeatedly across many experts. Which strategies only certain types of experts recommend. Which methods are mainstream and which are innovative and original.
The meta-curator’s superpower is recognizing patterns by clustering what multiple curators recommend. The clustering itself becomes analytical work. Similarities create the framework. Differences reveal the insights.
5) Real Examples
For example, in the last issue of TRUST-able, “Curation Signal focusing on Research and Sense-Making tools”, I was not trying to recommend the single best research app overall. I was creating small sets where differences between tools, and what they can be best used for (reading and understanding vs. comparing papers vs. trust checking them vs. find what to read next) could become immediately meaningful. The clustering makes those differences visible and actionable.
Jeremy Caplan does this brilliantly with digital tools in his Wonder Tools newsletter. When he covers AI writing assistants, he creates collections of four to eight similar tools, then explains subtle differences. This tool is best for academic writing because of citation features. That tool excels at creative content because of style variation. The clustering creates a comparison framework. The explanations of differences reveal familiarity with the tools and depth of testing.
You can see the same process at work in this recent excellent roundup “ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: Find Out Which AI Model Is Best in 2026”.
Karo (Product with Attitude) Zieminski and Daria Cupareanu recently demonstrated the bowerbird method powerfully in their blind comparison of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Instead of declaring one AI model universally best, they clustered three similar options doing the same tasks, then revealed the meaningful differences through systematic testing.
The clustering made patterns visible that scattered reviews could never show. Claude dominated writing tasks. ChatGPT won analytical business reasoning. Gemini emerged as the consistent generalist, never dominating but never disappointing.
By clustering similar AI models and testing them against identical prompts, they revealed which subtle differences matter for which use cases. Someone choosing an AI model can now see that the best choice depends on their specific needs, not on which model has the most hype.
This is the bowerbird method applied to technology evaluation: Cluster similar options. Make differences visible through the clustering. Help people choose based on their context rather than claiming one option is universally best.
6) How to Apply This: A Simple Approach
Most explanations of curation stop at telling you to collect good things and share them with some viewpoint or perspective. But - in many cases - doing just this, leaves out the most important work, the clustering that makes differences visible.
Here is how to actually apply the bowerbird method to your own sector:
a) Start by identifying a key problem in your sector where multiple similar approaches (ideas, strategies, methods, tools) exist but people struggle to choose between them. The options need to be similar enough that clustering helps, but different enough that the differences matter for decisions.
For example, if you work in content strategy, a good clustering opportunity might be approaches to building an audience online. If you work in productivity consulting, it might be time management methods for deep work. If you work in business coaching, it might be pricing models for service businesses.
b) Once you identify your clustering opportunity, collect some examples of different approaches. Not just names, but actual working knowledge of each one. If you are bringing together growth hacking methods, you need to have tried them. If you are clustering business models, you need to have studied real implementations.
c) Then identify what elements actually differentiate these approaches. For audience building, relevant factors might include time investment required, platform dependency level, time to results, and sustainability if platforms change. For pricing models, these might include predictability of income, scalability potential, client perception, and administrative overhead.
Now create your cluster by organizing the approaches using these differentiating elements. The structure could be as simple as:
Approach One: [Name] Best for: [specific context] Time investment: [realistic estimate] Key strength: [what it does better than others] Key limitation: [honest trade-off] When to avoid: [situations where it fails]
Approach Two: [Name] [same structure]
The commentary you add should reveal your evaluation process. Let people see your criteria. Show your reasoning. Explain what you paid attention to and why. Acknowledge limitations and trade-offs honestly.
What makes this approach so useful is not just the listing of different options. It is very much about organizing them so that someone can quickly identify which approach matches their situation. Not an effort to identify the best, but more of a map through which identify one’s own best depending on context.
7) Why Using The Bowerbird Method Builds Trust
Here’s the gist of it: The bowerbird does not show his attractiveness to potential mates by finding or showing something rare or unique.
The bowerbird proves its ability through two elements: coherence and consistency. The commitment to a theme. The ability to recognize patterns within similarity. The taste to know what belongs and what does not.
Your curated collections work the same way. When you cluster similar resources and explain subtle differences, you signal something AI cannot fake and claims cannot manufacture. You demonstrate deep familiarity with your domain. Judgment developed through experience. Pattern recognition from repeated exposure to subtle differences.
And when you do this, you’re not simply curating anymore. You are starting to map. You become a cartographer of ideas and concepts. And my sensation is that we are fast moving toward an age in which cartographers become the trusted guides people return to when they need to make sense of a complex terrain that can be traversed through many alternative roads.
Traditional thought leadership tried to win attention and respect through novelty and originality. The bowerbird method wins those elements by showing breadth of understanding and making patterns visible.
In a world where AI can generate endless variations of ideas, the ability to recognize and highlight key patterns, how they interact, different and complement each other, becomes undoubtedly a scarce and valuable skill.
People do not always remember the name of who said something clever. But they do remember who helped them understand their field deeply enough, and to make wise and fruit-bearing decisions. They remember who reduced confusion not by giving one answer but by mapping territory and the relevant options.
So, in conclusion, here is the question you should ask yourself: What similarity cluster in your field would benefit from your experienced eye identifying the meaningful differences? What problem are people struggling to solve where multiple similar approaches exist but the differences are not clear?
Start there.
Create one well-clustered collection where you demonstrate expertise through comprehensive organization rather than through claims of uniqueness.
This is a concrete approach that helps your readers understand rather than instructing them on what to do.
*Editorial Note (Paradata)
I discovered the concept of the bowerbird method through a YouTube video by Rob the Art Teacher titled “The Bowerbird Rule of Art Composition and its Paradox.”
Duration: 6’:31”
The connection to meta-curation was not immediately obvious but I definitely felt there was some connection to selecting and curating as well as to earning trust and authority .
So I jumped into researching bowerbird behavior through multiple academic papers, particularly the work of Gerald Borgia at the University of Maryland whose team has studied satin bowerbirds for decades. I researched clustering and pattern recognition through cognitive psychology papers to understand why this method works at a psychological level.
The article structure and examples were created manually. I used AI tools for research and reference checking but all synthesis, analysis, and writing was done by hand.
The step-by-step process and checklists came from documenting my own methods and testing them with several clients over the past year to verify they work for others, not just for me.
References:
Borgia, G. & Keagy, J. (2015). “Cognitively driven co-option and the evolution of complex sexual displays in bowerbirds.” Comprehensive review of decades of bowerbird research showing how males with more coherent, well-maintained collections achieve higher mating success.
Kriegeskorte, N., Mur, M., & Bandettini, P. (2008). “Representational similarity analysis - connecting the branches of systems neuroscience.” Foundational work on how the brain uses similarity to detect meaningful patterns and differences.
Jäkel, F., Schölkopf, B., & Wichmann, F.A. (2008). “Generalization and similarity in exemplar models of categorization.” Demonstrates how clustering similar items enhances discrimination and pattern recognition.
Gerald Borgia’s Bowerbird Research Lab at University of Maryland. Ongoing field research since the 1970s documenting bowerbird behavior, mate choice, and the role of curated collections in signaling quality.
Become So Useful, Credible and Trustworthy, People Can’t Avoid Subscribing To Your Substack
I teach expert consultants how to create great content that builds credibility and trust (even if you’re not a great writer).
I show how to increase authority and credibility by curating insights, research, news, resources and tools in your field of specialization.
What I can help you with:
a) Critical constructive review of your present market positioning to identify key strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement to differentiate yourself from the competition.
b) Analysis of your content / editorial approach to pinpoint key strategies that you could adopt to curate content that best aligns with your competence and that rapidly builds trust and credibility around your focus.
c) Mini-plan and specific steps for how to further develop and refine your communication plan over the course of the next few months.
Book a private one-to-one consulting session with me.
Cover image: The bowerbird and its artworks.
Why: Image generated with assistance from ChatGPT.
I have been curating what matters for experts, indie entrepreneurs and communication professionals for 25+ years.
What drives me is to learn, help others become independent, and improve through this practice the world around me.
I enjoy researching, organizing and making-sense of what I discover.
I strive to create useful and lasting information resources.
If you feel we are on the same path, please consider supporting this newsletter (like, recommend, subscribe).
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From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good