That moment at night,
When time is tight,
Watching my screen,
Immaculately clean.
That I can create,
Those words are innate.
That I can satisfy my duty
Of justice, truth, and beauty.
But I am tired and bored,
Empty and sored.
See you when I see ya,
But I don’t want to be ya.
I am bored. I am tired of writing small articles every day, questioning the real benefit of my daily creative habit. Yes, I am proud, but I also want to develop more perspective. What do I want? In the following exercise, I am dreaming about writing books.
I a World awash in information, we have the chance to know more while struggling to understand what happens around us. We need to grow our method to listen deeply, understand carefully, and share, with passion, novel and useful ideas. Which tools? What method? Where can we find the time to do it? What to share and how? Discover how dedicating more intention and attention to how we learn can lead us to be better thinkers, better professionals, better human beings.
The disciplined approach to finding effective, efficient, and sustainable solutions to big and small challenges can make a difference. Anybody can be a designer, but not everybody is one. By gathering and synthesizing general tools to understand problems, knowing their contexts, sharing with the people living them, and researching the best solutions, we can have a part in giving a positive contribution to increasing the ecosystem’s health.
Creativity means to create. It’s not pure inspiration, fantasy, imagination. There are tools, techniques, and approaches to make you more creative. It’s a change of attitude and perspective on life. Follow me on a journey into creativity to enrich your life.
Discover how building a daily writing habit would instill the energy to transform your life. Discover the sound of your thoughts. Harvest the gems of your mind. Put them in a shiny necklace to leave everlasting traces. Slowly. Piece by piece. Daily.
Hey, what do you think? Would you read any of them?
I write because I think more and better. Writing makes me better. I’ve developed a daily writing habit, and it’s one of the best things I could do to improve my life. What if I also want to be read? That’s a beautiful creative tension between the force of expressing myself and the desire to have a following. If you don’t explore this relationship, you might fail in serving both: you will write weakly for an audience you won’t engage, and you will create frustration for not expressing yourself fully.
By applying canonical questions with a genuinely curious attitude, you might discover pathways to satisfy your inner desire to express your creativity and find the attention of other people.
It’s the research question at the center of our inquiry.
The “why” it’s the starting point. It can be refined and reiterated.
They need first to find your writing.
They need to find it interesting.
Once they start to read it, they have to go until the end and extract value.
What are you writing? Online articles, blog posts, diaries, newspaper articles, academic essays, social media posts, etc.
How are the media and the style you’ve chosen affecting your findability, appeal, and effectiveness in providing value to your audience?
Is your audience finding your content in their most suitable environment?
Can they read it online, anywhere?
Can they access it using a mobile phone?
Can they read it even if they have special needs?
Can they read it when there is no connectivity?
When they need it. when it is suitable for them to read it
Can your audience find value in your writing when they need it?
Are you publishing at the right time and in the right place for your audience to take to fullest advantage out of it?
Your audience depends on who you are and who you want to express when you write.
Do you have a defined identity expressed in your writing?
Are you aiming at particular objectives when you write?
Do you want to be recognized by specific types, classes, categories of people?
Are you address your audience in a way that makes them interested and called to action?
Your writing can take other forms. Have you thought about other communication forms: podcasts, live sessions (online, offline), lectures, tutorials, videos, etc.?
When you stop writing for yourself only, and you caress the desire to reach more than one person, you need to start to work on your communication strategy.
All of the previous questions are just the beginning of a framework to explore deeply the reasons and the means driving your writing.
Writing is a creative and a professional activity allowing us to provide a service to others and to achieve our sustainability.
To pursue the ambitious goal of writing for self-development and getting a following, we must clarify our identity, mission, and the people we want to refer to identify the most suitable tools, techniques, frequency, approaches, and media to write.
I’d like to thank Kamil Hatimi, Gabriele Regio, and Tutuwa Ahwoi, for their kind contributions in discussing the draft of this article.,
I don’t like to do things twice. I get bored after one and a half time. It’s my joy and my pain. Neoteny leads to discovery. I’d like to have an insatiable curiosity. But I get bored. It’s painful when I have to accept the compromise of my writing’s outcome. It’s just good enough. It’s decent, maybe acceptable, sometimes good. What if I reread it and revise it? Too much work. Or, better, it might not be too long but, it’s boring. That’s where my cognitive dissonance chimes in at its greatest. Me, wanting to be read, with interest, with passion, and with a following, but not wanting to do the work needed to create such artifact. I am not unaware. I know the cure. To fine-tune a workflow, a method. Just write and rewrite. It’s that rewrite that really puts me in a difficult place—reading again, words vomited in a flow, almost unconsciously. So spontaneously spit. Who am I to revise what I have written? What right do I have to change the immediacy’s shape? If only I could develop more patience to take more care in words I am regurgitating, what would the noosphere reserve to me?
I can only dream about it.
Today, for sure, because I am not going to reread this piece.
Take this Grammarly!
– Oh, I like this version of “The Sound Of Music”!
– Version? This is John Coltrane, 1961.
– Yes, well, is the song sang by Julie Andrews in “The Sound Of Music,” the film.
– Is it? Let me do a quick search.
–Oh, you don’t need it. I know it very well.
And she starts to sing it.
If you have never watched “The Sound Of Music,” the film 1965, and you don’t know it’s a film adaptation of a famous musical, this might have happened to you.
On the contrary, knowing that tune from the movie would have generated an instantaneous connection in your mind.
That’s how we put pieces of knowledge together by connecting them. The requirement for the connection is to have the knowledge, not just data, nor information. We need to have a memory of sounds, words, pictures, and data about them. The fascinating power of our brain will do the rest if we pay enough attention. Yes, we should focus on observing relationships or, at the very least, be open to our senses when these opportunities happen by chance.
We can maximize the opportunity for connections by exposing ourselves to the broadest and most diverse knowledge while intentionally observing. Serendipity is an additional factor that gets in the game when we allow our minds to wander through the paths of seemingly unrelated facts.
“Contrast and compare” is a creative technique to combine two or more ideas or generate new ones out of the creative tension between the selected group.
The contrast makes something more or less readable. When we lower the contrast of a photograph, we flatten it. We make details disappear to reveal significant areas of color, light, and shade. We make the image sharper when we increase the contrast, with prominent areas highlighted and finer details more clearly readable.
The comparison happens when we put, side by side, two objects to find similarities, differences, relationships, and thus, connections.
By contrasting and comparing, we reveal the inner nature of the objects we are observing, facilitating the emerging of relationships. It could become apparent what was invisible to our eyes before this focused observation.
Some of the outcomes we might achieve by contrasting and comparing:
This creative approach facilitates our observation skills and puts us in the role of judges, evaluators, reviewers, investigators, researchers.
To compare, we need to know the objects of the comparison. We can only compare something against a reference, something else we already know. We also need to find homogeneous measurements when there is something measurable. To make a comparison, we need to do the work required to have an opinion: we must accurately research and study the samples to be objective and thorough.
We contrast and compare to learn better what we thought we knew by looking through deeper lenses and a more critical perspective. In the end, we could get either new ideas, the marriage of the source items, or we could be in a better place to make decisions.
Contrasting and comparing is a powerful tool in the toolbox of the researcher, writer, designer, artist, and creative person. It deserves further development as a creative tool with examples and applications.
Do you contrast and compare to learn, discover and create?
My challenge resides at the intersection of my 12 favorite problems. It’s expressed by one of the problems itself: how to address all of the 12 in an interdependent way?
If in the group, I include:
What’s the overall problem I am referring to? How can I consider all of them as being part of the same whole?
Organizing them by relation would lead to creating clusters:
Yes, it is stretched, I know, but I like what I came up with. How could I reformulate the One Problem using those clusters?
They sound like a mission. And I like that. I am creating the first drafts of my personal mission.
I should cluster my 100 ideas in the same fashion. Maybe in a future article. Which idea is related to my mission drafts?
Rereading the list, I find them relatively coherent, and that is reassuring. Which idea is falling at the intersections of my favorite problems and consequently in my mission’s realm?
I like this one:
Apply the metaphor of cooking to systems thinking, design, and as a simple project to create software to learn and teach about computer science, interaction design, and brain development.
Not bad. It touches on several aspects and disciplines with defined outcomes.
I will iterate this process each time I need to get inspiration to make progress. Ideas will get refined and refreshed while problems will coalesce into a more clear personal mission. I can use these better-defined concepts to write more about them and to filter information against them. That’s a good step forward in my creative approach directly influencing my Personal Knowledge Management System.
She had to find the necklace before the portal would close.
Tired, hungry, and angry, she started to feel desperate.
Whichever she looks, mirrors appear.
They render her fears, multiplied, indefinitely.
A kaleidoscope of visions jumped on her last attachment to reality.
Then, a glint in the distance.
Like a quasar sending colored cards about its death, rapid sparkles of pearls and diamonds echo in the dark forest.
With the last strength, she runs towards hope.
A dream of escaping, of finding herself in the quiet and comforting silence of its orbiting home.
Irregular reflective crystals shatter as she passes by.
That strange force field around her continued to affect the natural artifacts of this mysterious planet.
The intermitting spark gets closer.
Yes, it’s the necklace.
As soon as she grabs it with one last leap, driven only by the exhaustion of her body, a blinding light swallows her.
Bright Light. White. Deafening Silence.
She made it. Finally, she can enjoy a view from above.
Far above that menacing gaseous planet.
An infinite stripe of rocks paves the way.
It’s only a part of the orbital rings.
Tired, hungry, and angry she gets her hard-earned particle shower.
She was a stranger in a strange land.
And now she will be, again, a stranger.
But in another land.
Stranger.
Once you have created your 100 ideas to write about and then listed your 12 favorite problems, you should look for coherence between the two.
I realized that after having dedicated some thinking time to my favorite problems. When I came back to the regular ideation workflow, it became obvious to ask myself: are my ideas coherent with the issues I am dedicating my attention to?
Clustering would be helpful to see if you can organize ideas in groups. By mapping each cluster to one or more favorite problems, there should be, ideally, a 1-to-1 correspondence.
It’s going to be challenging to have the outcomes of two different activities in two other moments to match perfectly. And this is an excellent creative opportunity. Can you feel the creative tension appearing between those two extremes?
That is a productive occasion to create a feedback loop, a small creative system where ideas, concepts, and problems can become interdependent.
Here are some creative prompts to apply to your Ideas and Problems Creative System:
This self- and meta-reflection should be done periodically, especially when you move from free-flowing writing or journaling towards more structured and interconnected thinking.
Isn’t that a natural way to evolve towards a more systematic management of your knowledge?
A gradation is a set of intermediate steps or values between two extremes. Why is that interesting? It’s sporadic to find absolute values in nature that are always exactly the same.
It’s more a matter of minuscule differences around a value. It’s immediate to associate gradations with colors. If I think of “red” as a color, it will be something, very likely, different from the exact shade of color that another person would intend.
The word “gradient” comes to my mind, a transition between two values. The gradation can be smooth, or it can be jagged with perceivable steps.
The color spectrum is a scale of colors, the visible between red and violet and the invisible to human, the infrared and the ultraviolet.
Talking about scales, I think about music. If you want to practice with an instrument, The first thing you do is playing scales. You play each note in increasing sequence from the lowest to the highest, and then you go back. In this case, the gradation is made of steps.
The step size determines the granularity of the gradation. The larger the step, like a staircase, the bigger the walk to climb it. With infinitely small steps, you would have a ramp or a slide.
We also can have a gradation of emotions. In a wheel of emotions, between being angry and happy, there are many gradations. And this comes along with the related words to express those emotions. From calm to quiet, agitated, nervous, anxious, excited, happy, elated, hilarious, there can be a nice progression of words in a gradation.
Something similar happens for tastes and cooking. For instance, different mixtures and quantities of ingredients combined can create different gradations of flavors. The same goes for smell and perfumes. Think about how a cook or perfume designer will create the recipe the same as a musician or a writer, or a painter would do with notes, words, and color.
A gradation is associated with intensity, value, scales, and precision because the more diverse gradations you know, the more precise you can be in your expression.
The same will be with color. Think about “Rosso Ferrari” or the darkest color ever invented, the umami taste, or the captivating and weird notes John Coltrane composed in his musical pieces.
A creative game of finding all the gradations around the key and putting them in a circle or a sequence or a gradient can be a valuable way to organize your tools. According to the context, you can assign different gradations.
Gradation is a phenomenon and a range of tools. The more gradations you have in your toolbox, the more precise and effective you can be when you want to express, design, and communicate.
Knowing gradations means recognizing more patterns, having a richer perception, and a richer capability to express yourself.
