Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

  • Relax, don’t do it

    If you write or not write, nothing is going to change today. You were about to build a habit before completing your daily task and you are confirming you are continuing your streak. There may be none or few consequences of your breach and it might matter to nobody. But you are the only one responsible for this and the only one receiver of either the benefits or the damages.

    So, better put your thoughts together and, even if admitting an illusory defeat, declare your emptiness with a clear and determined voice.

    Here it is, my non-article for today. It’s a free-flowing exercise, I wrote it as it came, flowing, and I didn’t go back to edit any part of it.

    It is what it is. And it’s the no. 342.

  • Challenge Your Ideas In Public to Become More Innovative

    If you want to be original you need first to get rid of all of your obvious things. You can born gifted, always rich in ideas and inventions but it’s more likely that you were born like any other human being. Naked, vulnerable, and clueless. Being original as in innovative is something you develop. Only by having a lot of obvious and weak ideas you can come up with interesting ideas. And that happens only if you work in the right feedback loop, by assessing the validity of your ideas by testing them against the right challenge and by learning from what you observe during that collision.

    Being original, innovative means having the courage of letting go of your banality. If you have respect for yourself you do it in private. If you want to learn out of their lack of usefulness, you do it in public.

    This was my 341st idea assessment in public.

  • The Knowledge Creations Process

    Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.

    Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.

    But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.

    And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?

    This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.

    I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.

    How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?

  • Talking With Facts

    It’s not your desires, your hopes, your expectations, your opinions, your impression, your intuition, your experience, your imagination, your fantasy, your speculation, your creativity, your luck.

    It’s the facts doing the talking.

    You need to be humble to read the language of facts in an objective way. What did actually happen? How is that different from what you wanted?

    There, in that difference, you have a chance to learn, adapt, change direction, start from scratch or quit.

    t least, you won’t waste further time.

  • Talking to my future self about my knowledge

    There will be a time in the future when I will have organized part of my knowledge. I will be able to point at it as a tangible artifact and say, look, here is my book|website|course|software. I will feel proud although still not completely satisfied. It might be the moment when I will realize how much I have waited for that and I will ask myself: why didn’t I start earlier?

    338/365.

  • Knowing the Pieces Before the Assembly

    When looking to create a new solution starting from premade pieces you need to have a precise and exhaustive inventory of all the pieces and how they can connect with each other.

    Design is about finding new and useful connections. New, compared to the solutions found until now, otherwise you would have already solved the problem. Useful because they are satisfying the needs, wants and desires of the final users.

    It’s not wise to try to arrange the pieces without having a clear and shared understanding of their functions and their potential for connection, it could be inefficient or, worst, harmful.

  • Learning Goals Depend on Our Roles in Life

    A wise learning goal is set when you have a clear mind about what you want to achieve. We all wear different hats, we live in different roles: person, citizen, community member, family member, worker, author, etc.

    An effective learning goal is one set after having clarified your overall vision in your life and in your work. This might require time and effort and continuous revision but it would be the best way to identify a more meaningful learning path.

    We should accept ambiguity and multiplicity in defining our identity and our roles. They are fluid and in continuous mutation. If we create a process to iteratively focus and refine them we could better understand what learning direction to take.

  • Checklists to Pursue Learning Goals

    These are checklists to make my learning workflow tangible.

    Learning goal preparation checklist

    1. What’s your most important learning goal?
    2. What’s the most relevant source related to (1)?
    3. Identify the most useful content from the source in (2).
    4. Plan deep study of content in (3).

    Deep study checklist

    1. Why have you selected this content?
    2. How is this related to your learning goal?
    3. What is your expectation from studying this content?
    4. What other questions can you ask related to reading this content?
    5. Read quickly by skimming and getting a sense of what the whole piece is about.
    6. Identify those areas more relevant to your learning goal.
    7. Read a second time, carefully, slowly. Check the meaning of words you don’t know.
    8. Highlight those parts that are catching your attention. Rewrite the concept with your own words and keep track of the source.
    9. Collect all notes taken on this content.
    10. Review the notes, one by one, and add them to your Personal Knowledge Base.
    11. Create a plan to retrieve the key concepts expressed in the notes you’ve captured and test yourself against carefully craftef questions.

  • Funny Couples

    The will is there,
    and the ink is not lacking.

    But words struggle,
    in an incessant battle.

    I’d like to surrender,
    it seems so tender.

    Laid down exhausted,
    won but not busted.

    Instead, here I am!
    Ready to do my jam.

    I am fresh like a rat,
    on the shoulder, my pat.

  • Coherence in Data-Gathering

    You can define the rules for the internal consistency of data by seeing how different pieces are related together. By deduction, you can gather enough samples to support the definition of a rule. If you are so brave and lucky to come up with the internal consistency of the data you have gathered, then you need to apply those rules to the whole data inventory. Without knowing the rules at the source of that data you can increase its quality by applying the deduction you can make.