By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Twitter is a wonderful tool. This morning, as is my habit, I surfed my “favorites” column on my Tweetdeck platform to see what new and interesting things were being tweeted. And I noticed one of particular interest (I’ll get to it shortly) at the twitter page of Brain Pickings, a Web site that focuses on, in their own words,

“ . . . curating interestingness—picking culture’s collective brain for tidbits of stuff that inspires, revolutionizes, or simply makes us think. It’s about innovation and authenticity and all those other things that have become fluff phrases but don’t have to be.”

This twitter stream has alerted me to some unique and wonderful photographs, music, Web sites, charts and graphs, and books. True to its mission statement—and in service of the notion that “creativity is a combinational force”—it offers “

[c]urated bits of culture that will, at the very least, introduce you to new ideas and perspectives and, at their very best, help you think more, laugh more, create more.”

click to go to Schulz TED talk

This morning, the tweet in question directed me to a video presentation by Kathryn Schulz, a self-proclaimed “wrongologist,” author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. In it, she explains how we go through life trying to avoid being wrong (or, more correctly, being seen as being wrong), and how humans want to always feel “right.” She discusses how limiting that need to feel right can be for our view of the world and of others—especially those who disagree with us. She also gives an example of how it can be dangerous, as she points out in an example of a wrong-site surgery (the surgeon “felt” he was on the correct side”).

Sites like Brain Pickings and TED, “a nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading,” are worthy of your time—as nurses, we tend to spend much of our “continuing education” time in reading nursing literature or attending nursing conferences. Expanding beyond our comfort zones, beyond our career-related, “need-to-know” information, can inform our thinking in new and creative ways.

If you have some favorite Web sites or blogs that fit this bill, that inspire you as nurses and in your daily life, we’d love to know. And in case you’d like to follow AJN on Twitter, here’s our Twitter stream.

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