Massimo Curatella

Tag: creativity

  • 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.

  • Free-Flowing Explanation of the Free-Flowing Practice

    Free-flowing means writing whatever is coming to your mind and passing through your mind. Without stopping. Without looking back. Not knowing exactly what you are going to write. Not even approximately, actually. The trick is to transcribe your thoughts, not to think about what you might think. Or you might want to think. You are actually thinking about what you are writing.

    That could be a nice, impromptu explanation of what a free-flowing practice could be. I find it fantastic to warm up my fingertips and my neurons. Usually, it takes me from five to fifteen minutes to get in the flow. But if practice and I get accustomed to this way of creating spontaneously, then, I could be in the flow after a few dozens of seconds.

    The point is: what are you going to expect from this when you are in the flow? You want to go beyond the rust and routine and, slowly, gently, reach out to your inner self and really touch your deepest thoughts. If you have the patience and the guts to keep on writing, at a certain magical point, you will forget about your surroundings, reality will fade away and leave space for the sound of your thoughts forming on the screen.

    It’s not easy, the first time. And it’s really difficult to maintain concentration. Even the faintest noise could break the spell. Don’t stop. Insist and persist. During several months of practice, one day, you will discover yourself taking an inner journey into your thoughts with an unbreakable concentration. There will be no family member, no dog, no bill, no ugly noise able to get you out of your creative tunnel.

    Try.

  • Learning Pains

    I started to play a musical instrument. Last time I did it was so long ago that I barely remember. I wanted it and I have it gifted. Only passion and curiosity move me. Now I have fingers in pain and I can barely type these words.

    This pain is different from the psychological one experienced when trying to keep my daily writing habit. This is physical pain. I can feel it right now.

    And it is so good.

  • Connect Simple Ideas To Create Elaborate Thoughts

    I should not worry too much about what I want to write or what I need to write. I just need to do it. In addition to that, I need to organize my thoughts, my questions. My research into clusters aggregates. When I review the connection between the different pieces, I am able to find longer and more elaborate threads.

    I am doing it wrong by thinking that each time that I am on a blank page, I have to write my daily journal, or my daily article, that I need to be exhaustive about a grand topic. I should write about the smallest topic I can think of. A small idea to reflect upon. And I should use it as a magnet to attract somebody else’s ideas or notes I wrote about, things I’ve read in the past from other books.

    The real creativity is in composing those ideas into a bigger one. Not in having brilliant, big and exhaustive treatments of ideas, impromptu, of the day . I have been saying these things forever. I really don’t want to learn it. I am relearning it every time. I’m doing it. I just need to keep it present. So the daily effort of creating something that will remain is not to write something memorable. But it’s to create a small contribution, even insignificant, that put together with all the others you have been writing for hundreds of days. So that together, connected, revised, and even rewritten, they will become something really worthwhile.

  • Speculative Artistic Signature

    What if I were an artist? What would I create? How would I want to be recognized and remembered? I like the idea of Haute Cuisine’s chefs always needing to innovate themselves while keeping their signature recognizable. What is my signature? How would you recognize something I’ve created?

    If it is something emerging from the creation practice I should be able to identify it myself. That would be the bottom-up part. What is my top-down, intention, desire, in my signature?

    When you look at something I created I want you to recognize:

    • Beauty, elegance
    • Intelligence, wisdom
    • Timelessness, Long-term thinking
    • Meaningfulness, usefulness
    • Uniqueness, identity

    It would be interesting, now, to understand how to pursue those values.

  • Adding Review and Revision to your Creative Process

    In your deliberate practice of daily creative habit building you cannot skip the review and revision phases. Exercising your kick 10’000 times without feedback and correction would have a pale comparison against a complete feedback loop.

    When you write daily only the check boxes, that’s what you risk. A stale routine of boring activities carried on just for the sake of them.

    If you are serious about improving, then, reviewing your past performances becomes essential in your habit-forming practice.

    Where should you start? From the beginning, take your oldest artifact and put it in your review queue. If it is old enough there will be a good chance you will look at it as something sufficiently new for you. That’s a good application of the future self approach. If you put enough time between your creative production and the review you are multiply yourself into: past, present and future selves.

    Second order thinking would help in your metacognition. How are you reviewing your past creations? What can you learn from them? How will the learning affect your future creations?

  • Systematic, iterative, incremental experimentation as a self-growth strategy

    Intentional serendipity is a powerful technique to have new ideas and to test our thinking skills. It requires not only being comfortable with uncertainty but to search for it. It’s a delicate balance between preserving ourselves and our interests while opening to the chance by creating opportunities intentionally. As human beings we have in our nature both the adventure spirit as well as the one of surviving and so avoiding exposure to dangers. That is why it requires an effort to go beyond our comfort zone while minimizing risks. Iterative incremental approaches are useful to form a habit to experiment, continuously. Nobody would self-impose pain or lethal risks, and a healthy attitude towards experimenting, evaluating, and reflecting on the outcome of our trials is an effective push to self-growth.

  • Small Steps Towards Increased Future-Proofing of your Writing

    Hey, Max, this is your past self. I am present, yes, but as long as I write a word, it immediately becomes a thing of the past. I have finally a bit more time to reflect: I don’t like the latest trend with your daily writing practice, it has become a chore and a burden. Something emerged, though, your desire to leave a meaningful trace to be read back in the future. I wanted to highlight the nature of this pattern so you might take actual value out of it when you will read this.

    You are writing for yourself but in public. You keep on saying that you should be your first reader, the primary audience of your blog posts. It seems like you are failing all types of audiences since you are bored of your own writing. Hint: if you are bored while you are writing and you are not satisfied with what you have written you cannot expect anybody else to find your words to be interesting nor valuable. Curate better your list of interests and write about them, as a starter. Visualize yourself rereading what you are about to write: how will you like it? What value will you find in it?

    By being more self-empathetic you can try to understand better how to create more engaging content for others.

    A few months ago I did some critical exercises in trying to post myself questions about what I want to write and what I would actually write. It would slow you down but by being more critical towards your ideas you can improve them.

    Remember to separate the research, the first draft writing and the revision phases. You are too bent towards writing impulsively, because you’re lazy and bored (see above) and you tend to be undisciplined in your creative workflow. Write less and shorter but never skip the key stages of the creation process. Better one single sentence, meaningful, engaging, worth to be remembered rather than mumbling gibberish for the sake of filling a page.

    See? That’s better than the previous days. I’d like to read this again.

    Well done.

  • Old Tools and New Tools

    The absence of the usual equipment is a great exercise. It’s a creativite constraint forcing you to find new ways to do old things. On the other hand, acquiring new tools or more powerful versions of old tools is giving a boost to the desire to create. Once the initial curiosity of the novelty fades away quite quickly, (there’s a connection here I need to remember) what comes into play after is the increased speed and flexibility in executing the usual creative rituals.

    So, to keep your creativity alive try both: limit yourself intentionally to appreciate the value of your old dear tools and acquire or upgrade your old tools to get a creativity boost.