Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

More connections with people. Less with ideas.
The value we can get and give in a human exchange is always potentially enormous. Even if it is online. But we need to stop and reflect to generate creative value as well.
I am keeping on writing about the inspiration of the moment. Today, rather than reaching for the last resort, I will try to reflect upon what I wrote and identify patterns and connections.
Personal Knowledge Management
Not one but two times this week, I’ve been reflecting on my creative workflow, about how I capture ideas and how I generate new ones. Problem: a lot of the former, too little of the latter, leads to catching too much information. Not happy, I wrote again about this phenomenon while searching for a balance between a top-down and a bottom-up approach.
Experimental procrastination
When I don’t know what to write, I play with concepts.
Becoming a Knowledge Entrepreneur
It’s since 1998 that I am caressing the idea of “finding a publishing niche,” entering the “Society of Information,” becoming a “self-publishing professional.” In 2021 we call this figure a “Knowledge Entrepreneur.”
Regardless of its naming, I think there is a huge potential to exploit.
Meeting strangers for the sake of it (it’s beautiful!)
The week’s most intense experience has been the double meeting with two different strangers, assigned to me by Artificial Intelligences.
It was great, inspiring, serendipitous, and motivating.
I will do it more!
Oh, there are drawings, too:
Reflecting on my current Personal Knowledge Management Workflow
Writing free-flowing daily is still essential, but it’s like playing scales to learn piano. I need to prepare for a concert.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition
Isn’t it?
Meeting strangers like they were good old friends
I like meeting strangers online, especially when they are eclectic, diverse, and sometimes clueless as I am.
Seed your knowledge to grow relationships
Find the “farming ground” to “seed” your knowledge by contributing value. Give more than you take.
Acknowledging illusory defeat
It doesn’t matter how much you care about something. Words are cheap. Facts are what counts.
Networked Thinking: an update on my Second Brain / Zettelkasten / Mental Garden
More notes = more ideas = more potential new ideas connecting them.
Come reading my thoughts on https://curatella.com
It’s still free!
Make Me Happy. ❤
24 January 2021
Reflecting on my current Personal Knowledge Management Workflow
I am not making fair use of my Personal Knowledge Management system. I capture too much information. I organize it just superficially. I reflect on it too little. I am not leveraging on connections to have new ideas.
This very article, right now, I am writing it spontaneously. I could look into my Zettelkasten and see a list of drafts I have prepared. Or browsing the ideas to write about I’ve been collecting. Or even getting inspired by the open questions I’ve been accumulating.
Top-down and bottom-up: where’s the balance?
Going bottom-up allowed me to build a collection of notes that resemble a pile more than a system. The impetus of grabbing something interesting is always prevailing on the intention to research a topic. The top-down approach is suffering. I am subject to too much inertia leading me to fall into the Collector’s Fallacy. I am dedicating too little intention and planning to develop thoughts instead of collecting them.
Yes, I’ve expressed this annoying lack in my workflow two or three times already. I am using this space, again, to complain rather than react constructively.
Why is that so?
Because I’ve become too fluid in transcribing my thoughts, so the mental effort of researching, writing, drafting, and reviewing is something already far in my memory. What’s the most extended and researched essay that I wrote recently? I am suffering from the syndrome of checking the box: did I write and publish? Yes. And that’s it.
But, of course, I am not satisfied. While I am proud of keeping the consistency of writing daily, I feel the freshness and the relevancy of my posts to go lower and softer.
What to do, then?
I need to plan my writing time differently. There should be more reviewing of the information captured and identifying meaningful topics developed in useful threads.
Writing free-flowing daily is still essential, but it’s like playing scales to learn piano.
I need to prepare for a concert.
Stop collecting. Start connecting.
23 January 2021
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
The Most Basic Form of Mind Control is Repetition.
Isn’t it?
22 January 2021
Meeting strangers like they were good old friends
I like meeting strangers online, especially when they are eclectic, diverse, and sometimes clueless as I am.
I am not talking about romantic meetings. Instead, having honest exchanges about life, work, and all the rest. It became intense during the initial phase of the pandemic: an infinite sequence of webinars and meetings. It was fatiguing at a certain point. Then it transforms into a surrogate of socializing and hanging out with friends.
What I liked was the easiness of getting into a deep conversation without any hesitation. Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I also found people with rich and interesting backgrounds, sometimes with clear ideas about what they were looking for, some others just wanting to connect.
I’m again exploring meeting people online, either dear old friends or old new friends. It seems to me it’s always friends, at first contact. I presume the shared context leads to people with similar interests and attitudes to mine. So, in the end, maybe we’re not so different, and we have more in common than not. Or also, the social platforms’ algorithms are increasing in quality and match me with somebody I would find interesting.
Either way, after my 12 hours of work on a digital medium, I find it refreshing to have another hour of cultural exchanges with people all over the world.
Wanna meet?
Make ends meet
21 January 2021
Seed your knowledge to grow relationships
I keep on being interested in the concept of the knowledge entrepreneur. I’ve been introduced to it by Achim Rothe during a Knowledge Salon. In the event I’ve attended today, we talked about seeding: how to plant your knowledge while creating value.
These are some of the concepts I’ve captured.
Seed with a purpose
When sharing your knowledge, you are pursuing your goal while attracting other people to engage in what you have to share. You can contribute value if you reflect on your sharing context and keep in mind your knowledge sharing target.
The world runs on value exchange
A good principle to be a conscious citizen of the Internet is to give always more than we take.
The long-term view should always guide our participation: to establish long-lasting relationships and nurture interest groups without aiming for the sole immediate profit or personal interests.
Be specific and relevant
Look where you can provide specific value. Set the context. Clarify the offerings.
What’s the most appropriate way to share your knowledge?
Provide value by being conscious and tactful in posting your content. Provide added commentary and be on point.
Posting: curate your content, establish themes, guide people to the best of your thinking by illustrating novel ideas, learning materials, thoughtful reflections. One-liner links with no context are of no use. Explain why you are sharing your content and how it should be found useful
Commenting: don’t think about your content first. Contribute with fresh and spontaneous reactions to add value to a conversation. If it’s relevant and adds to the exchange, post some extracts or comment on specific pieces of content you find valuable.
Interacting: sometimes, your presence in live events is more valuable than linking or mentioning your content. We’re social animals, and we create the most value when we collaborate.
Go where people are
Look for the right places and the right moment where your knowledge, if shared, could make a difference. Sometimes it’s not in your digital avenues. You have to move and go where the action is happening or when somebody can need your expertise.
Selling vs. earning.
You sell when you promise value, and then you have to deliver up to the expectations.
You can offer your value by giving it up front, and then, appropriately, you can get rewarded with an earning. Choose accordingly.
Be modular and efficient
If you post something, make the content reusable. All the work will be lost if you don’t reuse it. Leverage your content production efforts by providing value to a community, first, and then reuse that content to create an evolved version of it or include it in a larger initiative.
Find the “farming ground” to “seed” your knowledge
Making an effort to establish the context and adding value to something already worth, and explaining why it is worth it is a responsible and appropriate way to seed your knowledge.
Who seeds knowledge harvests wisdom
20 January 2021
Acknowledging illusory defeat
It doesn’t matter how much you care about something. Words are cheap. Facts are what counts.
I committed to publishing a blog post every day. I’ve been pontificating about planning, preparing topics, having themes to develop, accumulating drafts, keeping on writing to be fluid. The truth is that I don’t have a draft for today. I am not ready to write nor to publish. The only thing I could do is to recognize that I failed.
I could have written about the importance of having a holistic view of the world to make better decisions.
I could have written about Human-Centered Design and how it puts people at the center of your design process by creating products and services that people love instead of wasting your time building the next app nobody would even install.
I could have argued that we need Ecosystemic Design, instead, because Humankind is too much at the center of production. And that we need to consider more our poor Planet in pain.
I could have written about the joy of being immersed in thinking aloud with brilliant minds about the global challenges of this millennium. And how only with the facilitation of Collective Intelligence can we hope to have a chance to survive.
I could have written about all of the above.
But I didn’t have time.
Oh, wait! I did write it!
It’s never what it seems.
19 January 2021
Networked Thinking: an update on my Second Brain / Zettelkasten / Mental Garden
Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in – otherwise, there is something terribly wrong.
― Søren Kierkegaard in Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
This is my Zettelkasten, my Digital Second Brain, my Mental Garden as it appears now:
A Network Graph rendering the notes in my Zettelkasten. Done in Obsidian.
I’ve been feeding it with notes for about eight months now. While I am not still leveraging on it for writing a full essay, I am quite satisfied with almost having built a habit of feeding it.
Feeding a Zettelkasten means adding your ideas to your Slip-Box, which is your Note Archive. ‘‘Feeding’ is an exciting word since you are supposed to think while you are creating those notes, and since you need to write notes in a specific way, you are expected to develop novel and useful ideas when working with your notes.
Because you’re writing to your future self, you can consider them a third person. To do that effectively, you should write in clear terms, providing as much contest as possible to make the note/concept self-containing. So, to do that, you need to explain your ideas in a way comprehensible to a six-year-old.
These kinds of notes called ‘zettels’ (don’t worry, it’s just ‘notes’ in German) are the neurons of your second brain. And so, now you will have guessed, the ‘synapses’ are materialized when you connect those notes in every possible way to create something new and useful.
What I find interesting is the scalability of the Zettelkasten Method. The more zettels you add to it, the greater is the network and the potential connections between its nodes.
More notes = more ideas = more potential new ideas connecting them.
Unfortunately, I have no problem whatsoever in capturing and collecting snippets of knowledge. What I need to improve on is the connection between them.
I am a young Zettelkastener, a shy Second Brainer, and a Toddler Mental Gardner.
I just need to have the patience to keep on doing it.
And to make more connections.
18 January 2021
The 1-2-3 Feynman Technique of learning
The best way to learn is to teach. One of the best ways to teach is to follow the Feynman Technique of learning.
I am reducing this teaching and learning method using the 1-2-3 Creative technique so it would become:
1. Explain the concept you want to learn using simple language as you were teaching it to someone else.
2. Identify unclear areas. If needed, review the original sources.
3. Simplify all difficult parts of the concepts.
You could facilitate your journey through the three steps by asking questions.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
—probably not Einstein.
Even I can understand this.
17 January 2021
Like sand piling up on the shore
You can sit on a beach, at the threshold between the dry sand and the edge of waves crashing on the shore. If you sit down and grab a fist of dry sand, it will go down and fly with the wind. Just a small bump of dry sand will accumulate, but it will resist for only a moment.
Instead, if you grab wet sand, it will slide down through your fingers regardless of your efforts to keep it. You could then use your hand, full of wet sand, as a Sac à Poche, a cone through which the wet sand could go down in a narrow stream.
If you direct your sand-based painting brush, you will have a blank canvas to draw upon the flat and levigated semi-wet sandy surface.
The sand-based paint is thick. If you keep your brush-hand steady for more than a moment while the wet sand is percolating, the sand will pile-up.
Listen to the music playing in your thoughts. Find the rhythm with which having your hand dancing. You can have patterns to form on the sand.
One long note and one long sweeping of your arm would let a small wall to be built. A Pointy rhythm, maybe percussions, would drive your golden brush to create a series of columns. If you insist on individual piles, you will have pillars to emerge until having towers and bastions.
You have infinite sand. The water will never stop bringing fresh and wet sand to the reach of your arms.
Grab fists of wet sands and let them pile up. Try patterns formed by movements. Dance them, invent them, sing them, do them randomly.
See the patterns you drew on the sands. Recognize familiar forms.
Is that a house? A bridge? An archipelago? Isn’t that a human feature? A nose? What about trying with lips?
Then, learn the winds, the sun, the warm, and the cold—the rain.
If you become good, you could have the wet sand to dry in a safe harbor. Protected by the waves, dried by sunrays and the salty breezes, the sand could form a strong crust. You can turn the sand into cement.
And your creation would resist the volatile whimsical of a moment to become something lasting a few minutes more.
What do you have to do?
Go playing with sand.
Get your hands dirty. Sometimes is the cleanest thing you could do.
16 January 2021
60 Times 60. Refining my daily publishing strategy
This one is my 60th daily blog post in a row. Why would that make any news?
Some reasons:
1. I’ve never done it before
2. I was supposed to do only 30 while I am at the double of that number, now
3. I’ve built a daily journaling habit, and I wanted to go one step further by making a daily publishing habit
4. I feel positively motivated by the daily commitment to publish, so I want to keep on doing it
Will I make 100? Why not?
But as I was writing at the end of my One Year Writing Challenge, numeric goals feel relatively empty and not very deep when reached. That’s why I don’t want to have shallow objectives. The goal should be to improve my thinking and communication skills by producing many ideas to obtain quality out of quantity.
I just don’t want to celebrate empty numbers as millions of words or streak of days. The goal should be to celebrate the outcome and positive consequences following my publishing, not my fingers’ sheer output.
Having clarified that, I have to admit that the daily burden is not always pleasant nor comfortable to honor. I plan to choose themes to develop so that I can connect conceptual blocks into something more elaborated later on.
The problem is that my interests are way more ambitious than my knowledge. And that would be good considering that this blog is for me to learn-out-loud but having not enough resources dedicated to the single knowledge blocks to build up the long-form essay or treatment puts me in a difficult spot.
I am frustrated because I cannot work for more than 10-20 minutes per day on a blog post. Now, think about what you can write that could be meaningful and useful about topics as:
- Systems Thinking
- Critical Thinking
- Design Facilitation
- Process Design
- Interaction Design
- Etc, etc.,
So I have to calibrate my writing strategy if I don’t want to get submerged by frustration and getting stuck in a never-ending loop of superficial blog posts.
I need to lower the bar of expectations.
What’s the smallest piece of knowledge that I could write about in a maximum of 30 minutes but producing something I wouldn’t be ashamed of publishing?
So, I am happy to celebrate with this post my 60th daily publishing in a row, but I am not satisfied with my long-term publishing strategy, and this is my attempt at refining it.
So long.
I like the smell of consistency, in the morning.
15 January 2021