Merging writing prompts and self-reflection adds meaning to a creative effort. When I reflect on who I am and who I want to be, I make progress towards a higher self-awareness. I am not sure I would write the same things if I redid the three previous exercises about another place, another time, and another person. And that is, maybe, what we should do: exercise our imagination in thinking about possibilities for our future on the others’ one. Imagining is easy, fun, and helps you focus without too much hassle. The value of repeating the effort of imagining a specific scenario could help to develop your imagination skills. Moreover, you can compare and contrasts the materialization of your thoughts about the same topic but in different moments and different moods. So these kinds of personal thought experiments are good to develop your thinking and assist in its evolution.
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Another Person
What if I were another person. Who would I be and why?
I cannot think about a specific person, and I don’t believe that being another person would automatically get that person’s good without the bad. Not knowing the entire person, I can’t say if I wanted to get a complete package.
As a young boy, I used to say that I wanted to be Superman.
I think I’m searching for invincibility. I just want to be invincible. I want to defeat any problem.
I’m a problem solver. I’m especially fond of impossible problems. I’m the impossible problems solver, the Impossible problems solver. This is the mythical man I want to be.
Another person that I want to be is a person that will be remembered. So it’s going to be me with the capability of being remembered. Why is that important to me? Because I realized that this life will end as it’s supposed to be because it is normal and natural. Maybe I am not accepting that. Perhaps I’m thinking that the meaning of my life is not only to live it and to give sense to others’ lives but also to do it in such a way that my last thought before dying will be, “I made it, I will be remembered.”
It will be possible that I will be remembered only by somebody, for a short time. So, it is not an absolute statement to be remembered by whom? for what? For how long?
There I am more ambitious. I would like to be remembered for a long time by many people for something that positively contributed to improving as many lives as possible.
Is this ambition supported by enough will from myself to sacrifice and to work for that? Let’s say anything is possible. I can do that. What is that thing? Am I able to do that thing? How do I know, If I will be remembered or not? Why is that important? Is this the best way to give meaning to my life? Isn’t it selfish and presumptuous? I think so.
So Isn’t this the right thing to wish for? Because the radical alternative is to be with to be a billionaire so that I don’t have to work and I don’t have to follow the rules. What is the intersection between the two? So, being free of being myself without constraints, without following rules, and being remembered for that. Different guys did that in the past, but not necessarily will they be remembered for the good they made.
So, we come to my dear friend Reddy, what can we learn from criminals to be applied for good. That becomes a tremendous surreal question, learning from criminals for good.
So what kind of person, what other person do I want to be? I want to be another version of myself. Still, I want to be myself, more aware of my nature, more aware of my capabilities, augmenting them, and looking for the next project.
213. Another Person. 
Another Time
The time that doesn’t pass. Using my sphere, I can travel anyplace, and I can decide to change the time as I wish. I can either travel forward or backward. I would go back in time when I was a happy little child. Granma’s whipped egg with sugar and Marsala is waiting for me in the kitchen. I slept 10 hours on two wool mattresses. Soft and embracing. The air smell of adventures and possibilities. I ride my red bike on a long road going down without touching the brakes. I reach the old fountain spitting water so fresh it freezes your throat. I drink the cool liquid after having masticated a mint candy. My head explodes into a bolt of ice lightning. The river is rich in life: king prawns, tadpoles, frogs, and little fishes Nonna Lucia used to fry. A whole world is living my youth not more than 2 Km from home, the equivalent of 2 billion light-years for an 8-year-old boy and his friends.
Or I could travel to the future when there is no pain, no violence, no need to work to live but pure energy pervading the universe where everybody can meet, in peace, dance, and sing the beauty of life.
So far I traveled only for 15 minutes.
It’s a start.
212. It will not remain a tadpole forever. 
Another Place
I dream about being in a perfect indestructible sphere. It is fueled by an infinite, silent, clean energy. It provides limitless clean air, water, and food to its passenger. I am inside, comfortably seated. I can see through the perfectly transparent surface–when I don’t set it completely opaque. I can travel anywhere almost instantaneously. I can float at any height, in any place, weather condition, or at any depth of the sea.
I am ready to leave. 
Start, Stop, Continue. Considerations.
A final consideration on the creative exercise of Start, Stop, Continue.
It should be done weekly.
Should drive retrospectives and consequent planning.
It should be aligned with 12 favorite problems.
Should help recognize things to avoid and opportunities to pick.
It should help alignment in a relationship or a team.
It could be done in a team to expand awareness and planning capabilities.
It could be connected with 100 ideas.
It can help focus and filtering information, acting as lenses and magnets.
Snapshots in time would allow comparison and reveal progress or not.
They can be driven by a mission or a bigger project to split into stages.
It’s a form of adapting and iterative thinking.
Things I Should Start Doing
What shall I start doing?
I shall start to meet people again. I am seeing nobody since the beginning of the pandemic. Yes, I met people, but so seldomly. And for such a short time. So we really need to meet people again.
And I would like to meet new people, people wanting to be creative, to look at the world from different points of view. And once to a good laugh.
I shall start to write my books. I have started to put a system in place. Today is one year that I am taking notes on Obsidian, the software tool. And I have so far about 2500 notes, about seven notes per day. I shall start connecting notes into threads and topics making sense, telling a story from the beginning to the end. So I shall begin to defragment my notes to optimize my thoughts to make more threads out of which I can create articles, chapters, tutorials, presentations, webinars, and books.
I shall start to exercise all parts of my body. For the last several months, I’ve been only walking. It’s a good activity, but it’s not enough. I need to find the time and the will to do a complete exercise of my body.
I shall start to use the internet, social media to have more generative conversations. I’m tired of just sharing things links, even my articles. I moved from consumer to creator, but I’m not getting great value from being a creator. It just seems like I’m creating for myself. Not getting back value, not getting back a lot of feedback. I’m not getting back more relationships. I am not making many opportunities to meet new people to think about new projects to create right. so I need to start to revise my approach in exposing and communicating myself differently, under a different perspective.
I shall start to pursue my interests and ambitions by contributing to their achievement with small but significant additions every day. So, even if they are small contributions, every day, I should make progress under two aspects: the top-down approach, which is the intentional one. So I need to be more selective and focus on things I want to pursue, and I did some work with my 12 favorite problems. And I need to do better the serendipitous scanning and filtering of everything that comes to my attention. So, that is not wasted time, but instead picking opportunities to grow my networked knowledge base to fuel and feed my creativity.
209. Things I Should Start Doing I could start doing interviews with people I meet with the interesting people that I follow with others, creators, artists, or even friends. Interviews are an excellent way to do many things that I mentioned: expressing oneself, meeting people, creating, thinking, elaborating your thoughts, growing your network, growing your knowledge, and even creating content. So, this is part of growing my network and meeting more people.
I should start to reread what I wrote. I am almost at the mark of maybe 1 million words since 2019. And I need to think about whether it is worth rereading it and finding common threads to make notes. And to annotate that massive amount of content into my knowledge base.
I should start to make art. I’d like to play an instrument. A bass, for instance, because it’s something that resonates with me. I frequently daydream about playing the bass. And I like seeing beginners and amateurs learning to play. Some great practitioners are playing beautiful covers that are better than the originals. And there are some songs that I would like to perform, especially Politicians by The Cream, or Crossroads and many others.
I shall start drawing or painting or doing photography that I used to do, and then I stopped.
I shall start to tell a story about my experience.
Continue Doing
Continue to write daily. It’s a great habit. Writing is thinking, deeply, in a focused way. Keep on dedicating your attention for at least 15-30 minutes to reflect and write. It’s a transformational activity.
Continue to take long walks at least three times per week. No life without health. But, additionally, you can listen to music, audiobooks, or webinars. You can actively participate in online events if the connectivity permits it. You can record your voice and transcribe it to have drafts ready to be added to your repository.
Continue to read every day. There’s no output without input. Read slowly, by carefully understanding words, sentences, and concepts. Rewrite what resonates with you and connect it with your existing notes.
Continue to track key events in your day. You know you are wasting your time only when you are aware of it. Have the courage of recognizing useless activities and give a name, a place, and a time to them. It will be easier to avoid them in the future.
Continue to plan your time. Slowly you will move from tracking black-hole to plan the best use of your time. It requires practice and a lot of failures. Learn from them.
208. Continue Doing Continue to have meaningful conversations on the Internet, especially on social media. Writing and sharing are not enough. It’s a passive way to interact with others. Ask questions, propose your answers, develop conversations and relationships. You are part of the larger community of humankind, contribute to it.
Continue to share your knowledge. It doesn’t matter what you know and how you know it. Share it. It improves your communication skills, your relationships and there is also a chance you can contribute to the collective intelligence. There is no history of unshared ideas.
Continue to Collaborate. Open your process up to meaningful input from others. Why recreate that which has already been done? As in life, working together can create beautiful outcomes that are more meaningful because of that collaboration.
Thanks to the anonymous contributors to this article.
Things You Should Stop Doing When Managing Information
Stop starting from scratch each time. Evolve what you know, connect your insights, and start from what you have. Starting from nothing could be a creative exercise leading to innovative results but it’s too much dependent on luck. Make your own luck by moving your bar higher at each iteration.
Stop separating information. Connecting information, even when of different natures, coming from different places, creates that diversity needed to have original ideas. You need one knowledge repository with one information inbox. Let all fields and topics cross-pollinate to bloom new knowledge you would not expect otherwise. So, stop saving articles in multiple reading lists.
Stop saving articles in a reading list. Process information now or never. Grow your system to store and organize knowledge, use it to annotate interesting things you find, now. Do not procrastinate or you risk hoarding information with the illusion of a future day when you will reread it again. Don’t delude yourself, read, understand and annotate it now.
Stop separating projects. There’s no convenience in one-time research, create your research repository where everything you learn and discover becomes part of a connected set of information pieces. Each project will benefit from the unexpected associations and discoveries you can make.
Stop taking notes. When you write on the books’ margin you are wasting your ink. You will never find again the thought you had. You won’t know how to search for it after a few weeks, you will lose reference to it. Extract the useful information by rewriting with your words and storing it into your note archive. Organize it by connecting it to existing notes by asking yourself “how do I want to find this again in the future?” Use organizational tools and techniques with the pure goal of providing value to your future self. Forget about biblioteconomy. Stop taking notes in different formats on different media. Use your unique personal knowledge base, all-inclusive, all-encompassing.
207. Intertwine Threads Into Interconnected Quilts. Stop processing information inconsistently. Fill in one inbox with all of the notes you want to make about all of your personal and professional interests. Process your unique inbox once per day or at the maximum once per week. Don’t do that and get lost in chaos and entropy.
Stop collecting information randomly. Set your goals, define your intentions. Create your 12 Favorite Problems to filter the World. Curate your interests and use them as lenses. Avoid distractions.
Stop complicating your life. Clarify your goals, continuously. Focus on your objectives. Adapt tools and techniques your needs, not all the way around. Remove waste, useless things, and distractions. Go for simplicity as a means to higher effectiveness.
Stop making To-Do lists. Follow your priorities according to your goals. Set meetings with yourself on the calendar. Now.
Stop having no ideas. Curate your note archive, connect your ideas, evolve your thought and start having too much to write about rather than too little.
Turn Your Brain On
Lack of motivation is the bane of the human being. We are constantly looking for the reason that drives us to do something. If we are in a situation of relative well-being, we risk becoming lazy and withering. Why should I exercise my creativity today? I have worked. I am tired, and I do not want to make an effort to find something interesting. Better TV or streaming, just press a button and watch something, so I rest my brain.
And even in that case, incredible to say, it is too much effort to scroll through that endless list of seemingly inviting offers. Horror or spy? Mystery or science fiction? But hadn’t I seen this before? Bah!
It takes a moment to shut down the brain. And the more we keep it off, the more we become prey to those who use it incessantly to fuck us. Until yesterday we needed the propagandist or the criminal on duty. Today we are constantly bombarded by sometimes subtle technology.
Of course, it’s easy to complain. It rains, thieving government; corrupt politicians; it’s all a magna magna, ah, bad luck !; eh, but this 2020 is just a year to leave behind; we hope for a better future.
And nothing changes because the brain remains off, and we are again at the mercy of those who live to improve or to cheat us.
Okay, but what does it take? You will say.
It is tiring, and it is difficult, it is against the trend, it is frowned upon, it is undesirable to turn on the brain.
Because you get dull, boring, you never feel good about anything, break others’ soul when “there are people here trying to relax or enjoy life.”
Meanwhile, those who think more and better than you live better than you.
It is not easy. It takes the ability to overcome difficulties, frustration, and strain on one’s self-worth, values, and beliefs.
But how much better can you be by striving to be better?
Infinitely better.
Turn on that damn brain. That’s the most important thing you have, don’t make it mold.
Try, for example, to devote time each day to focus on a creative activity. Whatever it is.
Watching streaming is fine too. But stop, think, what did you see? What did that mean? Where have you seen something like this before? How was it the same or different? What can you imagine will happen in a similar context? Has this ever actually happened to you? No? Why?
Life is beautiful and can be lived careless of its flow or treasuring every moment that passes.
Being present requires commitment.
Commit yourself.
206. Is there anything to turn on? 
Slowly Connecting Pieces into Larger Ones
In “How To Take Smart Notes,” the author says that an essay is something that you write, piece by piece, every day.
If you have one place where you store all of your writing pieces and, each time you write a new one, you connect it to the previous ones, then, one day, slowly or quickly, according to how you write and how much you write, you will accumulate several pieces in threads.
The idea of the book is that you should always be writing and carefully curate your note archive so that you always have threads forming.
It doesn’t matter if you continue to write on the same topic day by day. You can jump from one topic to another without any limitation.
The most important behavior is for you not only to store your writings all in the same place, but you have to weave them into threads.
You can start from any amount of information, drafts, articles, essays you have previously created. You don’t have to start from nothing. But you have to find connections between them to form threads.
Those threads are your “80/20”, your Pareto’s law of creativity. They are drafts. For anything you want them to develop into: articles, essays, chapters, lectures, podcasts, etc.
When you collect your draft by extracting a thread from your note archive, you change the environment. You rewrite what your initial idea expressed in that draft to transform it into the final copy was.
I know this process very well, but I keep failing on the most critical behavior: connecting pieces. So each time I have to write, I am starting almost from scratch because I don’t have threads formed, I cannot extract drafts, I have only an innumerable pile of fragments, all shiny, all interesting, all relevant at the time I captured them but inexorable separate, distinct, distant. They are not connected.
This is why I am starting my fourth reading of the book “How To Take Smart Notes,” with the idea of annotating it precisely as suggested by the author.
It’s the nth beginning, starting again with the hope of making it right this time.
So, I do want to write an essay, as well, and this is how I am setting it up.
How will you write your essay?