Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

  • Why is it interesting?

    Why is it interesting?

    Hoarding information is different from building up knowledge. When we fall prey to information overload, we suffer from the failure of our attention filter.

    When something captures our attention, we should ask why.

    Why is it interesting to us?

    When we buy a book, we should also find the time needed to read it. We are betting on our reputation. What is the value it can add to our life? Will we read it? Will we learn from it? Will we make the best use of the information it contains? Will we integrate new vital concepts into our knowledge wealth?

    Failing to clarify our motivations leads to the accumulation of dead weight. The search for information is impeding our growth like encrusted salt on flamingos’ legs making their flight deadly impossible. It’s a black hole entrapping our attention at the horizon of rationality, imprisoning our free will, dissolving our time.

    We want to search for knowledge, instead. Finding the best information when we need it, where we need it, to achieve the goals that will make us advance in life. It’s a springboard to our elevation—a propulsor for our levitation.

    You can fight information overload by stopping and reflecting. The next time you find a brand new shiny thing, ask yourself: “why is that interesting to me”?

    An effective answer contains three elements:

    1. Explain the reasons why you find it relevant.
    1. It’s a breakthrough concept in my professional field. I want to be up-to-date.
    2. I like the story, it stimulates my imagination.
    3. It’s an important topic for everybody, and I know nothing about it.
    1. Commit to extracting the best knowledge out of it.
    1. I’ll book a Pomodoro of study on my calendar every day for the next two weeks.
    2. I’ll listen to the audiobook during my daily walk. I’ll take voice notes that I will transcribe.
    3. I’ll draw a visual map of the key concepts.
    1. Make yourself accountable to give the highest value to the time and resources you’ll dedicate to your commitment.
    1. I’ll commit with a trusted friend to write a review within a month.
    2. I’ll write a blog post describing it and promise I will write a review about it.
    3. I’ll read it together with a group of people in a weekly book club.

    I’ve failed, gloriously, for years. And I keep on falling several times per day. But I am not lost, when I suddenly wake up from the torpor of the infinite black hole, and I ask “why is this interesting to me”?

    How do you preserve your attention?

    What’s your strategy for managing your interests?

    Squirrel!

    How do you save yourself from black holes?

  • Conjuring Creativity

    Conjuring Creativity

    We become more creative with addition and subtraction: by removing distractions and waste and adding stimuli in time and space.

    I remember my father stumbling into the bag on his way out. Hung from the door, he could not miss it. Sometimes on Sundays, he would leave before dawn to go fishing. He loved spending time outdoors, alone. He didn’t care much about catching the bigger fish. After long days of work, he would steal time from sleep to enjoy nature before spending time with his family.

    I always admired his being organized and accountable when planning for what he had to do and what he loved to do. That reminded me of how we learn to remember important things and make space for what we love.

    “Write a story”, said my friend Marco Genovesi,  “Do not waste words explaining what you have been doing for this silent year. We love stories. Be yourself.”

    I love to write. This newsletter, and this blog, remind me that I need to create something and share it. After one year of online silence, I am writing again. I am making the space to create. Again.

    And that makes me feel alive.

  • One Year Blogging Challenge Complete

    One Year Blogging Challenge Complete

    I wrote and published 365 blog posts, meaning, I’ve been writing for one year, every day.

    I am calm and relaxed, I have no plan to celebrate. This is not an ending, it’s the beginning of a new challenge.

    I will need time to elaborate on this experience. On the lessons learned, on my attitude, aptitude, and character. On what I want and what I don’t want.

    It’s been a wonderfully rich journey: full of joy and pain, doubts and discovery, stops and go’s.

    I am quietly and profoundly proud and I am looking forward to extracting the essence of this challenge with the perspective of beginning a new one, as soon as possible.

    This is my blog post number 365 out of 365.

  • New Beginnings?

    Tomorrow will be the end of my One Year of Blogging Challenge. I’ve been publishing a daily post every day for 364 days, today. So, tomorrow will be my 365th daily blog post in a row.

    I will be left with questions: what do I know, now? What can I do, now?

    I know more about me, my story and my history, what I think about a lot of things, what I use to think frequently. I know what doesn’t help me: forcing me through a process that became stale. I will be proud, tomorrow, mainly for one thing: I kept my word. This is the most important achievement. I did write and publish a piece every day, no matter what, regardless of life, work and family, and pandemic, and whatever else good or bad life reserved for me. But I did write.

    I decided a long time ago to take this goal as the only one to be the mandatory one. I stopped being concerned about the what and the how. That is why, if you have the guts, you will find any type of content in this random collection of writings: random thoughts, speculations, series initiated and never ended, drafts, sparse notes, unrefined transcriptions. Yes, there are some gems but most of it is brain dumping.

    I would consider this corpus of knowledge as the first draft of something. It’s a “let’s clean the dirty pipes” step of something bigger. A deliberate practice to test my endurance and my motivation while unleashing a free-flowing river of words, not always meaningful, not always coherent, not always useful.

    And that is good. But now what?

    What do I do?

    While I am not sure about the new roads to take, although I have some hints, I am sure about what I do not want to do.

    I won’t publish again something if I didn’t go through a sound process of finding something interesting to write about, research, revise and polish.

    At the very least I want to differentiate what will be just a brain dump with no presumptions compared to an article, with a message, for an audience.

    I know I don’t want to mix any longer what I wrote out of the need of practicing and freeing up my brain vs what I want to communicate to somebody to produce consequences, actions, or reflections.

    That implies that a daily cadence will be very likely kept. I will write every day, for sure. But I will not necessarily publish all of it. Now, I don’t see it worthwhile, unless I can produce something relevant to me and to at least somebody else.

    I am terrified of falling back to being who I was three or four years ago. Somebody who didn’t write. It took me thousands of hours of hard work, frustration, humiliation, pain, sacrifice to write what I will be able to write tomorrow. It’s an amorphous, unfinished, uncertain, and shaky achievement, but it’s a giant leap from what I used to do only some time ago. So, stating so clearly that “I am done writing every day” is a huge risk for my habit-forming practice.

    What if I stop writing altogether? Is it even possible? Shall I keep the daily public journal as the minimum but indispensable incentive to keep on practicing?

    What if I am stuck on this beginner level and I will never make progress to write valuable essays?

    I need a new strategy, I need to refine my habit-making practice: maintain the daily writing (the “no matter what”) and work towards the “read, annotate, connect and ideate, draft and revise, share and discuss” cherished level,

    What is it going to be?

    To you, Future Max.

  • The Pleasure of Connecting Knowledge

    When I found topics dear to me, treated in a documentary I felt a warm pleasure. The theoretical and abstract notion of stocks and flows that I caress multiple times per day, in my mind, in my work, in my life, seen represented with actual tanks and water flowing was a nice surprise. That’s a machine, an analog computer, showing how money flows from the state to all of its stakeholders and it shows it with water. What a wonderful way of using a labyrinth of tanks and pipes with water flowing thanks to gravity. The author is searching for the origin of knowledge and she asked the water-based system dynamics machine if education and knowledge were connected to economics: of course!, he replied, they are directly connected. And he shows what happens when the state does not finance public education anymore and the student debts become a bank loan so the national debt gets hidden! And that was explained in a few seconds, some lever adjusted and water flowing. That documentary will be a source of many more connections.

    363/365

  • Lousy transcription

    Oh, Feynman! I really want this to end soon.

    I am publishing my voice transcription as it is, maybe in the future I will try to understand it and funny things might happen.

    I feel the frustration I’ve building a habit of getting ready because I put the effort in I don’t see improvement for the outcome that I would dream off so the frustration is sad bye my poor performance of my daily practice and at the same time understood that having just and ambition of being a great writer or a great creator is a complete solution far-reaching frame chords don’t go through the process of working everyday heart in improving your skills in polishing ability of expressing your thoughts in words there’s no way to reach the level of quality that you respect so is experimental writing and blogging everyday for wilder.vs f****** that are chick you need to work hard consistently to create a habit which is not enough so labour starting point to systematically improving skills that’s the reason why I feel lying that’s not very much the separate in rich in the goal of having written for one year it’s a celebration of realisations so the journey has been useful to learn things that myself about practice about acquiring skills about mastering skills so what I am certain about is that I need to practice every day for sure in a need to establish a feedback loop allowing me to be more aware about my week points my my strong points and getting indications about how to improve improvement and that is separate from anything creative strategy in terms of content the other thing that I’ve learnt that is is creation process is separate and faces in although they are overs interacting want to each other all the time it’s useful to identify a clear that where you are I d 18 generating ideas or when you are listening you’re consuming content so you might want to take nos and that there is a connecting face when you are finding analogy similarity is contrast associations that is an important place where you can be original and creating new ideas and then there is the hard and boring phase of reviewing in lighting until fiinessing and polishing to

    362/365

  • To Clarify Make The System Visible First

    To create clarity out of messes we need to make an inventory of all the components of the mess. That’s not enough. Once we have an exhaustive and tidy organization we need to classify each piece and question its nature. Is it old or new? What’s its purpose? And most of all: with other pieces does it connect to?

    If we don’t have a detailed, well-organized, comprehensive inventory of all the components of a messy thing we can only use luck to make sense out of it.

    361/365

  • More Reading, Then Writing

    When I will conclude my year of blogging I will dedicate this stolen time to more reading. I’ve learned that If I don’t actively take notes while reading I will retain a few commas. So I will write while reading. I might be able to publish much less daily but I should be able to capture more notes.

    And, yes, then I will connect the captured note into a draft.

    Shall I do “a year of draft writing”?

    360/365.

  • Explaining the reason for a failure is illuminating

    Next week I’ll be ending this experiment. I’ll be concluding my 365 days of posting on my blog, every single day. I’ve listed a lot of the lessons, considerations, implications of this long challenge, I don’t know what to add. I feel like I am already done, today, seven days in advance.

    And this is the “old” me talking. The “me” before the effort of forming a habit, of making a more disciplined approach to creativity. I had no due dates, no commitments and any side project would have been good for wasting time. And that’s exactly my battle: avoiding dispersing energies mindlessly, throwing away time because “I am too tired” and “I just want to get rest”.

    So, once again, I am acknowledging my illusory defeat, I am clearly stating that I don’t have anything to write. Thing, which, is false since I have found so many ways to avoid that from happening. And especially false because I had interesting experiences to talk about.

    The effort that would require me to recollect all of my thoughts, put them in a meaningful way, extract the good parts, and put them in a usable format is exactly the work I am not doing.

    359/365.

  • Spending time with people to learn and getting inspired

    Reflecting on my search for an audience, I realized that I can focus my communication efforts on real people around me. The first “persona” is myself. It’s one of the many possible personas, meaning, when addressing my content to myself I am intentionally orienting my communication to things and topics which interest me. In a similar fashion I can look around me, to people close, friends and acquaintances. What do we share? What interests do we have in common? How can I research some of the topics relevant to them and produce meaningful content?

    It would be a “bottom-up” approach to select very specific topics to investigate, research and detail so I can make explainer content, for me to learn better, for them to appreciate some relevant knowledge.

    That’s the part when the old dear Design Thinking approach becomes useful. How do you know what to design if not researching what your users want, need, desire?

    In the end I should be more intentional and propositive in spending quality time with people I love trying to learn them better. It can be an occasion to have life experiences together, improving our bounds, bettering us as persons. It seems to be a great motivation to learn, develop relationships, acquire knowledge, develop new content and create new opportunities. Isn’t that exciting?