Massimo Curatella

Tag: creativity

  • How I didn’t write this article

    I’ve had the idea for this piece at least six times. I know it’s six because I found them all in the same folder, each with a slightly different title and the same amount of developed text: none.

    Here’s how it works. I get an idea — one of those that light up your brain, that make you think now this one is worth it. For a few hours I’m an organized person: I open a document, find some sources, sometimes I even get as far as a work plan. Then something happens. Actually: nothing happens, which is worse. The idea ends up in a folder. The folder gets fatter. I feel productive.

    This is the point where the story should take a heroic turn. You’re expecting me to say I found the method, the routine, the sacred habit of five hundred words every morning. I didn’t. I found something more interesting: I found the exact mechanism by which I fool myself.

    The illusion of the growing folder

    There’s a perverse feedback loop in accumulating material. Every saved note, every archived source, every idea parked in the right folder produces a small hit of satisfaction. It won’t be lost, I tell myself. I put it in the right place. And this is the most elegant lie I tell myself, because it has the exact shape of progress. It looks like work. It smells like work. But it’s stasis with a filing system.

    The result, after months, is a mountain of material loosely aggregated around interests that clearly matter to me — because I keep coming back, because I keep circling around them — but never developed into something someone else could read. A kind of intellectual compost that never becomes soil.

    The plot twist that isn’t

    The truly ironic part — and a little sad, if you think about it — is that this cycle repeats on the same ideas. It’s not that I get bored and move on. I return to the exact same themes, walk through the same phases of enthusiasm, rebuild the same preparatory structures. Like someone who repacks their suitcase every week for a trip that never departs.

    At some point I tried the route of brutal pragmatism: if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist. I set reminders. I ignored them with a consistency that, if applied to writing, would have made me prolific. I tried tags, project folders, routines. Each additional layer of organization failed exactly like the previous one, just with more style.

    Diagnosis as yet another form of procrastination

    And here we are at the final paradox: I know exactly what the problem is. I know that my goal is not to collect material. Not to organize it. Not even to process it. My goal is to take a thought, give it a shape, and put it in front of someone who can respond. Everything else — the sources, the notes, the folders, the systems — should serve that purpose.

    I know this. I say it. And I don’t do it.

    Because diagnosing a block with surgical precision is itself a sophisticated form of not writing. It’s the final level of the game: when you’ve exhausted every ordinary procrastination strategy, you’re left with self-analysis. Which is stimulating, which is revealing, and which produces exactly the same result as every other strategy: another note in the folder.

    What you’re reading

    So I did the one thing I hadn’t tried yet. I stopped preparing the jump and just jumped. What you’re reading is not the result of weeks of elaboration. It’s not the outcome of a work plan dutifully followed. It’s a thought that took shape today, and that I decided to publish before the folder swallowed it.

    It’s not polished. It’s not complete. It doesn’t cover everything I wanted to say. And that’s exactly why it exists.

    I’m left with one question, and I’m passing it to you because I genuinely want to know: where do you get stuck? Not the generic, textbook kind of stuck. Yours. The specific one, the one you know well, the one with a precise shape you could describe with your eyes closed. The one you’re probably putting off right now.

    Tell me about it. At least one of us will have taken a step forward.

  • Tools You Don’t Wield

    Tools You Don’t Wield

    Thinking, and tools for thinking

    Why am I so fascinated by this?

    If I were to “satisfy” this attraction, how would I do it? I mean, if it’s an obsession, a continuous desire, why do I have it and keep having it?

    “Tools” is the first part of the attraction. I think of something that empowers, that lets me do what I cannot do without it. I’ve always been drawn to the armor, the sword: facing a “jungle of problems” with equipment that amplifies me.

    But I’d be confusing the fact that “tools for thinking” aren’t necessarily physical trappings, crutches to strap on, or drills to grip, but rather methods, ways, attitudes that concern my thought, my mind.

    Of course, tangible tools exist: books, pen and paper, whiteboards, audiobooks, podcasts, people who talk to you and guide you, but also playing cards, tokens, board games, sticky notes, hourglasses, timers, highlighters, colors, brushes, and so on.

    In theory, if blended with a process that aids thought, anything can be a mental tool.

    A dinner with friends, for example, is for me a powerful tool for thinking. It’s only when I’m in the company of others, around a table, that I manage to have the most memorable conversations, to explore the most abstruse and fascinating topics. Of course, the people make the difference, as does the place, the spread, and above all, the food.

    But then if everything can be a tool for thinking, by definition, nothing is. Or rather, how could I identify specific ones to suggest to someone else who might want to use them?

    Probably it’s the method and the use one makes of them, toward certain ends, that makes the difference. I imagine a tool for thought as: “something, someone, or a way of thinking” that helps me approach a topic or problem differently, hopefully more effectively, that brings me, if not solutions, at least alternative and stimulating ways of looking at my goals.

    I must confess: dinner with fun and stimulating friends is my favorite tool for thinking.

    When shall we meet?

  • Convergence of Ideas

    Convergence of Ideas

    A Personal Journey Toward Intentional Creation

    “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
    — Inventing the Future, Dennis Gabor, 1963

    In recent years, I have embraced a habit that has radically transformed how I think and learn: every day, I reflect, write, and capture ideas that inspire me. But it wasn’t always this way.

    Once, my mind was a vortex of stimuli: articles, videos, conversations—a continuous stream of information dissolving into chaos. Imagine trying to hold sand in a sieve too large. Every grain slipped away, leaving me with a sense of incompleteness and fragmentation.

    The real transformation began when I decided to create a digital space to bring coherence to my ideas. This space is not just an archive but an intellectual haven where every thought finds a place, ready to be reworked and connected to others. It has been a gradual process—built through trial, error, and continuous improvement—but each step has brought me closer to a system that makes my learning meaningful.

    Now, I find myself at a new crossroads. I no longer want to simply gather and organize; I want to create. In the past, I wrote spontaneously for my blog and newsletter, rarely drawing on my notes and focusing on the immediacy of writing. At most, I refined a draft, without worrying about connecting ideas or weaving them with previous articles. The change I want to introduce now in my creative process is to capitalize on an active archive of interconnected thoughts. I want to transform what I’ve accumulated into something tangible, useful, and meaningful. This requires time, dedication, and above all, persistence—a reminder that true creativity is not a fleeting spark but a deliberate act.

    I cannot predict the future, but I can invent possible ones. Every step forward, every connection between ideas, is an act of building.

    On this journey toward intentional creation, I recognize patience as my greatest ally. Each day is an opportunity to add another piece, to shape the mosaic I am building. I am ready to face this challenge, one idea at a time.

    I share these thoughts, admittedly, for myself. It’s a way of tracking my progress and ambitions with an increased accountability. It gives me an extra motivation to keep working on them. It frightens me to conclude with a declaration of commitment, a provocative question that pushes me toward the direction I am envisioning. Yet, perhaps that’s the right reason to be courageous and launch it—aimed at myself, to be answered tomorrow.

    What future am I inventing?

  • Creative Growth Reflections

    Creative Growth Reflections

    I had a lot of fun when I wrote spontaneously, without too many expectations. The painful beginnings were just that—painful. It’s a bit like learning to ride a bike or learning a new language: I have legs, and I know how to use them to walk, but pushing on the pedals and trying not to fall is challenging, frustrating, and sometimes, you even smash your face. Then, slowly, I got going, smoothly. And do you know why I was doing well? Because I didn’t care about what I was writing. The important thing was to make use of those minutes stolen from life, often at night to have a creative moment all to myself. The second hurdle was publishing it online. Fears, doubts. What if I write nonsense? What if I offend someone? What if I make a fool of myself? I think I had the chance to answer all these questions and more simply by continuing to publish. Once I got going, I began to reflect on what I wrote. What had I written? Would I ever be interested in reading it again in the future? When I acquired the good habit of writing every day, I began to wish for a direction, a common thread. This brought up the first doubts. The daily cadence, if not prepared with significant efforts, is peremptory and inexorable. There’s no room for iteration or incubation. You have to write in half an hour and publish, which takes another half hour.

    After about 400 articles, I completely grounded to a halt. It had become a burden, a weight. Having to organize the day with the constant thought of writing something was unbearable. And the more I suffered from the pressure, the less satisfied I was with what I wrote. Until, without warning, and unfortunately with relief, I simply stopped. Every so often, I felt the itch in my meninges and fingertips. I have a billion thoughts in constant flow and at least three or four (hundred) times a day it seems I have that idea, that insight, that connection that deserves to be captured. But life flows on. The scroll refreshes the feed, and it all vanishes in a few minutes like a fantastic dream in which you can no longer outline the blurred contours.

    Change of medium: I tried podcasting. Ambitious, eager to plan, to embrace, once again, all human knowledge, I forced a group of poor friends to go on video with me. It was a nice experiment, I learned a lot. I had only one goal, to make 10 episodes. I did them. Good boy. And now?

    Too much work, too demanding. Let’s see what happens after a short break. The break still lasts. Let’s go back to the newsletter then. The first of the year, a magical day: I will write a new edition of my newsletter every week. I will experiment with AI, in ideation, revision, and illustration. Great initial fun. Not much conviction. But I kept up the pace. The goal was to make at least 10 editions before screaming to the world. Indeed, I didn’t promote it at all, maybe just a link on X. And then, on yet another Saturday night with the newsletter deadline the next day, I put something together quickly and sloppily, annoyed, and unsatisfied. It never came out. It made no sense. I wasn’t convinced.

    And this brings us to today. I recognize defeat. This is not the way I love to cultivate my creativity, it does not belong to me, and I do not recognize myself in it. Ironically, one of these newsletters was spontaneously linked on social media. Think about it, the first share after five years of publishing online. What a mocking fate.

    So what now? Two weeks of daily reflection led me to completely reconsider my way of writing, but most importantly, that of publishing. I interrupted the weekly publication cadence. So be it. It’s okay. It was useful, once again, to stop and reflect.

    Out of respect for those who read me, although a bit late, I thought to share these spontaneous thoughts. And this makes me feel better. I promise to update you as soon as I have clearer ideas.

    In the meantime, just reply to this message to contact me.

    Thank you for your time.

    Max

  • ChatGPT for Creativity and Creation, Hands-On Review

    ChatGPT for Creativity and Creation, Hands-On Review

    I played with ChatGPT, and it was a truly surreal and exciting experience. ChatGPT, it is a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to generate responses to prompts. It has the ability to maintain context and remember previous statements made in a conversation, which allows it to have an impressive level of awareness and understanding. Or, at least, it seems like it understands.

    I started by asking ChatGPT to produce a press release for my CREAZEE Daily Writing Habit Challenge. I wanted to see if the chatbot could understand the topic and generate a detailed and nuanced press release about the challenge. To my surprise, ChatGPT was able to do just that. It produced a press release that included implications and attitudes about the practice of building a daily writing habit, which showed a level of relevance that I wasn’t expecting.

    Next, I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be an instructor in the CREAZEE challenge and produce 30 daily writing prompts. Some of the prompts were similar to ones I had already used, while others were quite creative, such as “describing a familiar object as if it were unfamiliar”. It was able to generate a list of prompts that were good, if not very good.

    After receiving the prompts, I asked ChatGPT to continue the conversation as if it were a participant in the challenge. At first, it felt strange to be having a conversation with a machine, but after a few minutes, I found myself forgetting that I was talking to a chatbot. ChatGPT was able to maintain context and remember previous statements made in the conversation, even producing a summary of key points from previous prompts.

    Although I started this experiment at midnight, without expecting too much from it at the beginning, I ended up chatting with ChatGPT for more than two hours.

    One of the most surprising aspects of ChatGPT was its ability to create short stories with absurd characters and scenarios. For example, it generated a story about a Franciscan monk lost on an island with an iPhone that had no signal and another about a gas station operator and a Bitcoin maximalist arguing. These stories were not only creative but also perfectly plausible, which showed the true potential of the tool. In both of these cases, ChatGPT was able to create a cohesive and believable narrative despite the seemingly impossible elements.

    However, there were also instances where ChatGPT struggled to generate a cohesive story. For example, when I asked it to write another story about two characters arguing, it produced a series of disconnected statements and ideas rather than a cohesive narrative.

    ChatGPT did make some mistakes during our conversation. For example, there were times when it produced boilerplate error messages saying it was “just software and didn’t have memory”. It also lost count of the prompts it created itself and got stuck in repeating the execution of one of them. While these errors were a reminder that I was talking to a machine, they didn’t diminish the overall quality of the conversation.

    This demonstrated that while this digital tool is capable of generating creative and engaging responses, it still has limitations in terms of its ability to fully understand and incorporate complex concepts and ideas into its responses.

    Overall, my experience with ChatGPT was truly remarkable and opened my eyes to the potential of artificial intelligence. It was amazing to see the chatbot not only understand and remember what I was saying but also generate responses that were creative and engaging. While it had its limitations, it was still an impressive demonstration of the capabilities of modern AI technology. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for technology like this.

    A note about this article

    I used not one Artificial Intelligence to write this article but multiple ones. Otter.ai transcribed my voice notes and provided a short bulleted summary. Google Doc checked the spelling and grammar and suggested several corrections to wrong words and incorrect expressions. Grammarly supported my grammar and my writing style, as well. ChatGPT provided a rewritten initial draft of my transcribed notes to transform my not-so-fluid voice notes into perfectly formed sentences. Not happy, I wanted to illustrate this article with an image generated by MidJourney.

    I have already started to merge with Artificial Intelligences and I feel excited, amazed, and a little bit frightened.

    Read the ChatGPT transcription log

    Read my ChatGPT Log to see for yourself what this novel Large Language Model-based application replied to my curious prompts for more than two hours:

    ChatGPT Chat Log
  • 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.

  • 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?

  • How to receive brutally honest feedback

    Call anybody you can reach to, even a family member is fine. Prepare on the screen the prototype, the mock-up, the demo of the visual artifact you’ve just created and you want to have feedback on.

    Do not make any introduction, do not give any explanation: call the chosen tester and ask a direct and straightforward question: “What do you see?”.

    As the first thing you want to have the first reaction, you want to listen to their thinking process. When they start to describe what they see, do not make any reaction, do not judge, do not answer. Keep on asking “and then?” or “why?” or “what does it make you think of?”. Ask only open questions to elaborate on what they are seeing and feeling.

    Only when you are satisfied and their patience hold, if you feel like, ask them more specific questions like: “Do you like it?”, “What do you like?”, “What don’t you like?”.

    And only at the end try to give context, application, and audience: “How do you see this ‘thing’ in the context of conveying this ‘message’ to these ‘people with the objective of achieving this ‘communication goal’”?

    Congratulations, you had the chance of receiving brutally honest feedback.

  • 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.