Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

  • Containing Large Multitudes

    Containing Large Multitudes

    This is my Day 1 Article to participate in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Habit Challenge April 2021. And it is also my Day 136 Article since I’ve started to write daily.

    I am Max. Massimo Curatella if you want the full name. Presenting myself has always been a problem.

    Not anymore.

    “Hi, what do you do?” used to be an embarrassing question for me.

    “Yeah, I write about Computer Graphics, but I am also a programmer. I am studying as an Engineer, but I want to make movies and videogames. Yeah, not started yet. In the meantime, I am doing training for architects. No, no, it’s not related, but I like it. Oh, yes, the university courses, I designed and developed them because a friend suggested me to do it for the Physics Faculty. Oh, I think Design is the key success factor of software. I find it even more fun than software development.”

    That would have been one of the many conversations I would hold with people. And I would usually remain with a sense of incompleteness and unsatisfaction.

    Fast forward 20 or 30 years, now I am using my roles in a fluid and fluent way. I can talk “programming” if I am with developers, I can defend “design” with colleagues and client, I can propose “training” with corporate, I would suggest “facilitation” in social innovation and agile management, I can “write and speak” in diverse settings if I need to. (Another day I will tell you about, management, direction, research, coaching, and mentoring).

    Why? Because that is who I am.

    How? By remaining humble, accountable, and, first of all, supporting what I promise with valuable evidence.

    Is it easy? No, it is not, and it took me my entire life to find a bearable balance and make an advantage out of it.

    What about tomorrow?

    Thanks for this question. I’ve found a beautiful way to manage all of the passions and the threads passing through my mind: writing about it.

    And this is just one of those threads.

    I dance between roles and labels. I use them for my benefit. I aim at being what I can be by playing with possibilities and potentiality. That’s who I am today. Ask me again tomorrow.

    Oh, and I am large, by the way.

  • I am ready, I am CREAZEE

    I am ready, I am CREAZEE

    I’ve been preparing for the launch of this moment for some decades. I still remember desiring a project of my own when I started to write for a specialized printed magazine in the 90s. And then for another. And I was then participating in several start-ups, ventures, courses, schools, films, videogames. I always wanted to have a product, a service, a community. And I also tried a few times. With software, first. It took me so close to the occasion of my life, but I was too young to catch it. With an online community, then, but it wasn’t, in the end, what I wanted. So I resume dreaming.

    Until now.

    Now that I have a project that excites me, that keeps me awake at night with the fire of creativity. That evokes closer dreams of achievement. Now that I have been preparing all the materials, the websites, the newsletters, the forums.

    Now that I am at 48 hours from the official launch: I feel sick.

    I didn’t have a cold nor the flu in three years—the time when I decided to walk at least one hour per day. I have been walking for 3’000 km since then—about 80 Km per month. And my life changed. Oh, woman, if it changed. Of all the benefits that I started to get: avoiding colds and flu were among the best.

    And now that I need to have all of my energies and enthusiasm, I have this piercing pain in my ear. Soft sounds rumble like explosions in my head, and I can barely concentrate on writing.

    No fever, no other symptoms, so I don’t think I need to worry about other significant problems.

    So, what is it? Why did I take this minor obstacle as the perfect excuse to avoid working and facing this exciting new beginning?

    It’s fear.

    That’s what it is.

    The fear of failure. The uncertainty of exposing myself. The fear of discovering that this project is not what I am expecting. The fear of not being up to the level of conducting it.

    I am wiser and better equipped than in the past. When on these occasions, I would have remained paralyzed. In the flee or fight, the former would have been the choice.

    But not now.

    I’ve prepared all things needed for the first cohort of my CREAZEE Challenge.

    Everything is ready as I am.

    Despite some small impediments and unreasonable feelings, I am ready.
    I am CREAZEE.

  • Sunday is perfect for writing

    Sunday is perfect for writing

    Sunday is perfect for writing. Why not writing every day?

    And you should build a habit to write every day.

    On the 1st of April 2021, I will launch a Daily Writing Habit Challenge at CREAZEE, my new website.

    You’re invited to participate at a discounted price.

    Build a Daily Writing Habit

    The outcome of my daily writing habit brought his fruit, this week also, I’ve split my publishing between creazee.com and curatella.com. For your convenience, these are my recent articles:

    Write now to think better. Writing is thinking, remembering, focusing, collecting, and reflecting. Writing is augmenting and expanding thinking through time.

    Write what you care about. What do you care about? That’s what you have to write. It’s the most powerful and immediate way to face the complex challenges of our times.

    Write About your 12 Favorite Problems. When you don’t know what to write, you should get inspiration from your 12 favorite problems.

    My 12 Favorite Problems. You should always be working on a dozen of your favorite problems. What are yours?

    Never run out of ideas. How can you always have ideas to write about? You need to cultivate them. Overcome the thrill of ideation, get unstuck, fill in 100 rows with ideas.

    I will make you write every day. I will use any means, trick, method, tool, approach to making you write every day. Some of them will work, some others will not.

    I will make you write every day. Don’t you believe me?

  • My 12 Favorite Problems

    My 12 Favorite Problems

    1. How to stay healthy
    2. How to take care of my family
    3. How to be a better thinker
    4. How to educate children
    5. How to be sustainable
    6. How to create networks of networks of changemakers creating a positive impact on people and the planet
    7. How to make my life meaningful, worthwhile
    8. How can I leave a legacy that will make me remembered in a positive way
    9. How to spend more quality time with quality people
    10. How to improve the ecosystem’s health
    11. How to relieve suffering
    12. How to know more about what is unknown

    What are your favorite 12 problems?

    See a new iteration of this article: My 12 Favorite Problems, Version 2

    The problem with problems.
    The problem with problems.
  • Writing, CreaZEEng, and Learning

    Writing, CreaZEEng, and Learning

    While preparing for launching.

    This week has been hard. Heavy work. Heavy creativity.

    I am almost done with defining the official launch date for CREAZEE.

    And, of course, I’ve been writing every day:

    • Write 100 Ideas, Now
      Change your attitude towards what you want and what you can create by exercising your creativity. Be CREAZEE!
    • What have you learned today?
      If you want to become a better learner and give a higher value to your experiences, keep track of what you have learned daily.
    • Stay superficial, stay amateur!
      I have serious problems in finding the motivation and the time to study properly. Especially about what is supposed to be for me solid acquired knowledge.
    • Buonanotte
      Free-flowing writing, if you’re brave, is the only thing you can do when it’s almost time to sleep.
    • Learning Out Loud: What is a Customer Journey
      In an HCD process, a Customer Journey is a tool to learn about our users’ potential and intentional experience.
    • Time Traveling
      You need to respect more yourself. Respect the hard work you have done. Don’t ruin it.

    See you next week.

    Do you know me?

    Are you CREAZEE?

    So many options, such a little time.
    So many options, such a little time.
  • Write 100 Ideas, Now

    Write 100 Ideas, Now

    In preparing my CREAZEE Challenge for the upcoming cohort, I’ve come up with a shock-therapy: if you want to join, create 100 ideas and share them with me.

    It worked in an experiment I did with a wannabe artist who found his idea in just two days by doing what I’ve suggested to him: write down 100 ideas in one day, then select The One. It worked fantastically! And that’s another story I will share with you in the future.

    Just by pure coincidence, somebody sent a YouTube video to me talking about “The 101 Desires Techniques”. Well, you won’t believe it, but it is incredibly similar to the approach I invented. That’s what I want to share with you today.

    The 101 Desires Technique by Igor Sibaldi

    Are you able to say what you want in a clear way? Many people cannot. This exercise helps you to rediscover the skill of being able to state your desires.

    This exercise affects your personality and how you live your life because you discover capabilities and talents you would not have imagined. Not only within yourself but also around you. You become a better observer. We’re accustomed to seeing the world of others by being outsiders. Changing, we appreciate to desire and want other things because we become aware of the world. We become full of questions.

    How to write the desires

    1. Every desire always starts with  “I want…”
    2. Do not use negations like “I do not…” or “I want to be immune,” instead write, “I want to be perfectly healthy.
    3. ” Do not ask for money because money is a means, not an objective. Money is about the “must,” not the “want.” Instead, ask for something tangible, like “I want a castle” and not “I want to have the money to buy a castle”.
    4. Only verifiable desires, no abstractions like “I want to be very generous.”
    5. Avoid comparisons like “I want to be as good as…”
    6. You cannot ask something for somebody else. You cannot say, “I want that person to heal.” You can only say, “I want to be able to help that person so that they can heal”.
    7. No serial desires. You cannot have multiple similar desires: “I want a house in Paris,” “I want to have a house in New York,” it induces obsessive desires. Every desire must be unique and a discovery.
    8. No diminutives or vezzeggiatives. Be brave and precise with your desires.
    9. Each desire should be 14 words at the maximum. That is “I want” plus 12 words. Each desire should be in a breath. And we need to be concise to be more determined. If you want something, you need to state it concisely. ( “If you know something, you can express it clearly”).
    10. Do not ask for sex or a love affair with specific persons because it’s like dishonestly forcing somebody else. Instead, ask, “I want to have reciprocal love.”

    You need to write 150 desires to choose 101 from them. You will review them every day for one year, and you will write off the ones achieved so you will replace them with the remaining ones.

    Usually, the most absurd desires get realized. Those who surprised you when you created them.

    The desires not realized are the most important because they hide something crucial about you. You should investigate why they did not materialize. The more you study them, the more you will make them possible.

    After writing the first ten and then 50, you will completely change your attitude in writing your desires. You will grow, and you will reconsider what you were wanting. You will pass from being selfish to higher purposes. From “having a luxurious house” to “making art to share.”

    Why re-reading our desire list every day? Because we have to get accustomed to the beauty of what we have written.  It’s a way to jumpstart your mind in thinking differently.

    This technique is coming from ancient Buddhist practices. We live in a river of opportunities and inspirations at different levels. We’ve been accustomed and educated to look at what we have as everything we will ever be able to have. This technique pushes you to look at the higher level of this opportunity river, where there are big things for us we can desire. If we are aware of that, we have the chance to grab them. Otherwise, they will pass by without any impact on our lives.

    How to use this technique to be creative?

    I am amazed at the popularity of Sibaldi’s technique. I’ve never heard about it. I have several doubts about his version’s spiritual and mystical aspects, and I don’t feel attracted to those themes. I will try to apply the best insights in my “Write 100 Ideas, Now!” to coach, train, and facilitate my CREAZEE friends to create a daily habit. Join us!

    What if you could realize just one of your 100 ideas?
    What if you could realize just one of your 100 ideas?
  • What have you learned today?

    What have you learned today?

    Journaling is a powerful practice for self-reflection and leveraging on your experience. You should include in your periodical writing what you have learned during the day or recently. The prompt is very easy: “What have you learned today?” 

    The exercise of going back with your memory to the experience you just lived is important because it reinforces what you have done and allows you to extract the best information. It will become the knowledge you want to synthesize, strengthen, summarize, and store. You can learn with it. You can leverage it.

    The best way to reflect on your recent learnings is to take from 15 minutes to half an hour to record your experience. You could voice-record it. It would be more flowing. It’s just a story you are telling about yourself and the experience you had. Or you could write it down quickly and straightforwardly.

    You should highlight the things you’ve noticed:

    • What surprised you?
    • And then, what did you do about it?
    • What happened in a concise way so that you can summarize the events?
    • And what happened that you want to remember and connect with things that already happened in the past?
    • Or what do you need to remember next time that you will face something similar?
    • Is there a process that you want to grab or of pattern about your approach or behavior?
    • Is there a specific tool that was particularly useful?
    • Or is there anything new that you discovered about new tools, new techniques, new methods, unique names, or new people?

    Collecting your set of questions to query yourself and your memory about it, you get the most value out of your daily life. You will have the possibility of extracting further knowledge or ideas, maybe through abstraction, for instance, or connection. You will get ideas to write about, teach about, or share, or perhaps experiment next time you will face a similar situation.

    If you want to become a better learner and give a higher value to your experiences, keep track of what you have learned daily. 

    It might not be what you think superficially.
    It might not be what you think superficially.
  • Stay superficial, stay amateur!

    Stay superficial, stay amateur!

    Learning Out Loud is incredibly valuable for me. I am questioning all of my assumptions, I am stating clearly what I know and I research with a motivation what I want to know better. You need to be really confident to expose your ignorance. But as it happened to me with writing publicly, it’s only at first. Then you realize that the opportunity you have to learn is greatly superior to the risk of having fingers pointed at you. At the end, who cares? I am working to be a better person by doing systematic work to find my areas of improvement, isn’t that one of the best ways to be more knowledgeable?

    I must confess I have serious problems in finding the motivation and the time to study properly. Especially about what is supposed to be for me solid acquired knowledge. I tend to move fluidly and fluently between domains and disciplines and, unfortunately, I function really well even if I don’t have certifications and Ph.D.’s. Insolent? A bit? Reckless? Yeah, sure. Works? Yes! (at least for now, who knows for another three decades?)

    But this doesn’t mean that I don’t always strive to perfect my skills and improve my knowledge, so practice is fine, the experience is gold but wouldn’t it be better, also, to see what others have already successfully done in your fields?

    From time to time. Yeah. But be careful, not to do it too frequently.

    You might risk becoming an academic or, a real expert.

    Stay superficial, stay amateur!

    Who knows what you don't know?
    Who knows what you don’t know?
  • Buonanotte

    Buonanotte

    Hi, how are you? Writing at night, again? It’s not a bad sensation. It’s cold outside. Sweet jazz music is playing as a sound carpet. To make it even smoother, a ten-hour loop of raining sounds is playing together. All lights are off but the bright screen. Almost blinding. But I don’t want to reach for the remote. I would lose the moment. I’ve been waiting for this fragment of time for the whole day. An impetuous flow of ideas passed through my head and left very little. I am here to catch the remains of another hard day, spending more energies than I have. I was hoping to have one calm moment, to focus, to think, to create. Not today. Or, at least, not until now. My time belonged to somebody else. Not me. It’s now, now that I can barely keep my eyes open, red, tired of looking without seeing, tired to blink in the hope of washing away the veil of superficiality. It’s now when my fingers get confused on the keyboard, in the dark. When I am hitting too many times the delete button. Wasn’t I suppose to write in free-flowing mode? No doubts, no second thoughts, just straight transcriptions of my thoughts. I am getting warmed up, little by little. I am washing away the noise of the day fading away. Why must I sleep? Isn’t now the perfect moment to create? No distractions around me, no attention needed from me if not the one to be me. I should become a night animal. Where’s the tutorial to do that? Is it maybe an idea for a Youtube Channel I should start? “Subscribe now and learn how to live two lives, one during the day, the usual struggle to make a living while juggling with the unexpected consequences of people thinking short-term, the other at night when you can dream being a superhero or the next inventor. Warning: talk to your doctor before initiating potentially risky approaches for your health.” I can picture it. Black circles around my eyes, a small glass of Limoncello, talking with a low and warm voice to an audience of self-deluded creatives. That’s how it goes when you plan to research, collect ideas, generate inspiration, discuss projects, make connections, and, in the end, you realize it’s only time to go to sleep.

    Buonanotte.

  • Learning Out Loud: What is a Customer Journey

    Learning Out Loud: What is a Customer Journey

    This is another experiment in Learning Out Loud. I want to check my knowledge about the Customer Journey, a concept design tool to synthesize the path a person goes through to meet your brand, products, and services, buys them, use them, and ask for support.

    WARNING: This is a learning exercise coming out of my mind without any reference. Wait for my assessment to see how it went. I warned you, okay?

    Storytelling for design

    A Customer Journey is a way to narrate the story of people becoming your customers. Stories are useful to share and discuss. We can understand better how somebody behaves if we tell a story about something they’ve done. We can also tell stories to imagine how a product could be used or designed following needs, desires and constraints.

    Two moments in time: stories from the past and the future

    A customer journey is a design tool that can be used for at least two purposes:

    1. capturing the story of a symbolic person meeting our brand and buying our product
    2. Imagining an ideal story of a target individual experiencing our brand from the beginning to the end

    Our User Research activities determine the first. We have talked to potential and actual users, and we synthesize a model of the typical persona to whom we want to speak with our brand.

    The story we want to tell has a narrative arc covering the usual phases through which you go through when buying something:

    1. I have a problem or a need, and I start looking for information about possible solutions.
    2. I make a list of potential candidates. I research characteristics and prices. I start to make up my mind about buying a specific product.
    3. I look for comparisons, reviews, and possible samples or demos.
    4. I finally decide to buy the most suitable product by going online or in a physical shop.
    5. I have it! I use it! I experience everything related to the solution promised by the product I’ve purchased.
    6. I refer to the support for help or maintenance.
    7. I dismiss the product because exhausted or because I don’t need it anymore.

    For every ideal horizontal lane of this story representing the columns of a canvas, I can imagine rows covering different aspects:

    1. What I think
    2. What I feel
    3. Painful moments I might live, obstacles.
    4. Actions I take to pursue my goal for that phase.
    5. Opportunity to innovate the experience

    Don’t take it too personally.

    A persona is an ideal and symbolic person who could help the designers to refer to something tangible rather than too abstract. Sometimes we tend to give a physical aspect and credible characteristics like names, jobs, habits, but it could be excessively stretched and risky. A persona should be created by looking at the insights emerging by user interviews and other user research activities; otherwise, they are far-fetched, which could confuse our design direction.

    A Customer Journey as a plan

    The same matrix structure describing the story of an experience can express the intention we want to follow in our design. As a sort of blueprint, a model of what we want to build, a Customer Journey can represent the characteristics of the experience we are designing.

    A Customer Journey is a living document, as many other design documents are, and the design team should keep it constantly updated. The as-is version with new insights coming from new user interviews and the to-be version with the refined specifications.

    In a Human-Centred Design process, a Customer Journey is an essential tool to learn about potential users’ experience and communicate tangibly the experience we want them to have with our products and services.

    WARNING: This is a learning exercise coming out of my mind without any reference. Wait for my assessment to see how it went. I warned you, okay?

    Is this a Customer Journey?