The way I understand it is, and I'm new here too so take this with a grain of salt, to get curation awards you need to be an early upvoter on a post that becomes popular. Anyone can go find popular content at the top of the "hot" section. But if you take the time to "curate" new and unseen content and identify things that you correctly think others will like, then you deserve more reward...

from https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/

"1 .Only vote on posts that you believe others will also vote for.

1. Vote as early as possible after the content is posted...."