The concept of passing the time or being entertain can be a toxic disease. An infinite quantity of entertaining material is waiting for you to pass the time with. You might be very effective at passing your time by reading books mindlessly, watching films passively, playing videogames skillfully. In the end, what’s the value you got? If it is only “passing the time,” you might have just wasted your time.
We should try to be actively engaged in most, if not all, of our experiences. What’s really interesting about the experience I am having right now? Is it worth remembering? Shall I do something else? And, most of all, do I need to save this piece of content by wasting storing space and hoarding useless material that will pile up indefinitely?
We need to be more critical in our approach to consuming what surrounds us and move to a different mindset, the one of being creators rather than consumers.
It’s only when you trust your team members, and you are sharing a solid mission and, first of all, when you know you can expose your thoughts without feeling you’ll be judged for that, or worst, they will be used against you, that you can work to gain clarity.
When you are working to solve complicated messes and wicked problems, it’s crucial to think quickly and deeply at the same time. You need to experiment and be prone to make mistakes. You need to put your self-worth on the line each time a decision needs to be made and you are an essential part of the decision-making process.
It’s not an easy environment to create, either creative or professional. It requires a lot of time to work together, know each other, and have several experiences together: good and bad.
That’s why you need to have the patience to stay with a group as long as possible if you want to reach alignment of purposes and harmony of skills and character. It’s one of the best work and create situations where you feel you are giving a substantial contribution to whatever you are making together.
It’s a great way to grow as a professional and a working group.
I’ve created CREAZEE to find external incentives in maintaining my daily writing habit. It’s a private group of people writing, every day, each on their own, contributing to the same community forum, sometimes following a common prompt, sometimes each one independently. I am the habit-building facilitator, a community coach, writing too, leading a group of wanna-be habitual creators. I started my habitual creativity challenge way before, and I am now on day 220.
On day 83 of group writing, I have repeat questions coming to my mind every day.
Timing
How is the sequence of shared articles influencing the group? For example, how am I influencing others if I publish my daily article first? Or last?
When shall I publish the daily prompt? Day by day, at the end of the day (how is timezone dealt with?) What would change if I posted all prompts for a month at the same time?
Participation
How to deal with who doesn’t write? If the One Rule is “You Will Write Every Day,” shall I throw out of the challenge who misses a day?
What about reminders, nudges, and gentle pushes: shall I go one by one and remind them they have to write for the day? Up until which level should I go? Shall I phone them?
What can I do to automate the reminding process, so I don’t have to spend my time chasing participants?
Pace
Diverse participants with diverse backgrounds, skills, attitudes, objectives write at different paces, varying lengths with various efforts and outcomes.
What is my role as a facilitator and a coach to help them keep the daily pace while respecting their diversity? All in all, a day is the same for everybody: either you wrote or not. How is the different distribution of efforts and outcomes distributed on that day of the challenge, and how does it affect my role and the overall group performance and mood?
What happens if we write simultaneously, setting a specific time frame during which we actually write together? What are the logistic implications?
Goals and motivation
I have never stressed the goal of why you should write daily, and I am not asking any participant to explain why they want to write daily or why they should do it. Is that affecting the group motivation? What would be the difference if each participant had to declare their goal at the beginning of the writing challenge? Would it be feasible and reasonable to allow individual plans to be pursued in a group effort?
The subject matter
Right now, I am providing a daily prompt which is optional. Participants may or may not follow it. Is that a waste? Shall everybody write following the same prompt? Or shall I drop the prompt entirely and just transform it into “write about anything you want but write?”
What if participants had to declare a milestone project giving continuity and coherence to the sum of their daily efforts? How would it affect the logistics and my responsibility as a group facilitator?
What would be the effect of having several independent trends posted daily, overlapping in the group forum?
Private or Public
I have never forced participants to share the daily articles publicly. What would change if we made it compulsory to publish on the Web the daily contributions?
Have your say
I would appreciate your thought on the above questions and reflections, either if you participated in CREAZEE or not.
I understood I need to create solid external motivators for me to pursue personal goals beyond professional ones. I must admit I went from unemployed to working, from no websites to a personal blog, from nothing written online to about a couple of hundreds of articles on the Web. I wanted to build a community to support my motivation, and after months of doubts and false starts, I also created it.
Now, I have different threads going on with additional pushes and other needs. Finding the right balance is difficult. It requires making an inventory. I should review all parts of this little ecosystem I created and check my goals.
The Personal Website
Curatella.com is online. I publish daily or almost daily an article. There are about 200 of them. The following is low and quiet. I am dealing with diverse topics. There is no strong continuity. I tend to write a personal diary rather than offering content with a specific value for a defined audience.
It’s the source of all ideas and experiments. It all starts here, and the other experiments are usually spin-offs of this central laboratory.
The Daily Writing Habit
CREAZEE.COM was born as an idea to challenge other people to build a daily writing habit. It has a more defined scope: it’s about building creative habits. It’s pretty comforting to have such a clear mission for a project. It helps me better to understand what I should put in it.
The Creative Community
The CREAZEE Community was the natural container for the participant of the writing challenge. We are now at the 60 days of life. I’ve learned a lot, and I discovered a lot about imagining an online service, setting up the infrastructure, promoting, hosting, and moderating a small group of creative people. It was fun, inspiring, tiring, sometimes frustrating but one of the best learning experiences I have ever had. That is the real learning-by-doing I was looking for.
The Future?
What’s next? How do I want to leverage what I have learned so far? How shall I evolve it?
It all comes down to why I am doing it and what I want to get out of it. It’s painful to get in an unstable situation where I have to motivate others to get the motivation to create.
Either this feedback loop is not convenient to me in terms of creativity, or it is working great but not in the right direction. I love sharing my creative process with others, and I feel blessed to collaborate in ideating and developing ideas. I don’t want to create additional fragmentation, though. I don’t want to be the only one responsible for leading and motivating a group to create because I need to be part of that group and receive the same motivation.
It’s like having an engine started and getting in motion while lacking a clear direction to follow. We’re moving, where are we going?
That’s another bi-faced aspect: adapting while moving. It’s motivating and, at the same time, limiting. I have so little time to dedicate to reflect and create that I cannot plan long term. So I can perform only those maneuvers allowed by those 15-30 minutes per day, stolen from life.
Those are the two key issues:
What’s my goal?
Do I have enough resources to pursue it?
What’s my goal?
I want to think better, work better, live better. I know I can do that by learning better. I have a strong intuition towards learning by doing. Reading, understanding, communicating, and writing are the pillars at the base of a learning workflow enabling me to pursue my goals. I can motivate myself to build and refine my workflow only if I commit publicly to do it.
So, I can only learn in public.
So, whatever I do should be part of a shared, collaborative project to put myself into it.
I need to involve a community of creative people by sharing what I’ve learned and learning from them and with them. But I cannot get too involved in different topics and threads than the ones I want to focus on. I need to find an abstract level to collaborate. A way to share questions, approaches, methods, tools, and techniques that apply to any topic. So, while everybody creates and learns, I can contribute to the progress towards achieving my goal.
And now what?
So the problems of habitual creativity and knowledge management are good and valuable. The service I want to provide should be about “how to be creative every day” and “how to manage your personal knowledge.” And that’s it.
The Daily Writing Habit Challenge should focus on the approaches and the techniques to “write every day.” There should be less overlapping with the topic choice and each individual’s direction.
This doesn’t prevent us from finding commonalities and ways to collaborate on the same topics, though.
The Personal Knowledge Management System is my joy and pain. I’ve been struggling to build one for decades. There are no magic formulas, no perfect tools, no ideal workflows. I need to work and produce knowledge that allows me to pursue my goals: there are no other criteria. That’s my learning journey, my path of discovery, and there is a lot I can share with a community.
What do you think?
Thanks for your patience. I am aware I keep on raising questions and bringing uncertainty. This is the place where I can share this kind of thought. So if you reached this point, I am thankful for your attention. Do you have any suggestions about finding a better solution to motivate my learning while sharing it with others?
I am bored. I am tired of writing small articles every day, questioning the real benefit of my daily creative habit. Yes, I am proud, but I also want to develop more perspective. What do I want? In the following exercise, I am dreaming about writing books.
Managing Your Knowledge
I a World awash in information, we have the chance to know more while struggling to understand what happens around us. We need to grow our method to listen deeply, understand carefully, and share, with passion, novel and useful ideas. Which tools? What method? Where can we find the time to do it? What to share and how? Discover how dedicating more intention and attention to how we learn can lead us to be better thinkers, better professionals, better human beings.
Everything is Designed, Design is Everything
The disciplined approach to finding effective, efficient, and sustainable solutions to big and small challenges can make a difference. Anybody can be a designer, but not everybody is one. By gathering and synthesizing general tools to understand problems, knowing their contexts, sharing with the people living them, and researching the best solutions, we can have a part in giving a positive contribution to increasing the ecosystem’s health.
Living a Creative Life
Creativity means to create. It’s not pure inspiration, fantasy, imagination. There are tools, techniques, and approaches to make you more creative. It’s a change of attitude and perspective on life. Follow me on a journey into creativity to enrich your life.
Writing Daily: a Transformational Practice.
Discover how building a daily writing habit would instill the energy to transform your life. Discover the sound of your thoughts. Harvest the gems of your mind. Put them in a shiny necklace to leave everlasting traces. Slowly. Piece by piece. Daily.
Which one would you read?
Hey, what do you think? Would you read any of them?
“Contrast and compare” is a creative technique to combine two or more ideas or generate new ones out of the creative tension between the selected group.
The contrast makes something more or less readable. When we lower the contrast of a photograph, we flatten it. We make details disappear to reveal significant areas of color, light, and shade. We make the image sharper when we increase the contrast, with prominent areas highlighted and finer details more clearly readable.
The comparison happens when we put, side by side, two objects to find similarities, differences, relationships, and thus, connections.
By contrasting and comparing, we reveal the inner nature of the objects we are observing, facilitating the emerging of relationships. It could become apparent what was invisible to our eyes before this focused observation.
Some of the outcomes we might achieve by contrasting and comparing:
Finding previously unnoticed details.
Discovering similarity between something apparently different.
Establishing order in the observed group.
Identifying hierarchy allowing to define what comes first, what dominates, and what doesn’t.
Revealing connections leads to breakthroughs, discoveries, or innovation by creating new and advanced concepts born out of the comparison.
This creative approach facilitates our observation skills and puts us in the role of judges, evaluators, reviewers, investigators, researchers.
Contrast and Compare to find connections between ideas and concepts
To compare, we need to know the objects of the comparison. We can only compare something against a reference, something else we already know. We also need to find homogeneous measurements when there is something measurable. To make a comparison, we need to do the work required to have an opinion: we must accurately research and study the samples to be objective and thorough.
We contrast and compare to learn better what we thought we knew by looking through deeper lenses and a more critical perspective. In the end, we could get either new ideas, the marriage of the source items, or we could be in a better place to make decisions.
Contrasting and comparing is a powerful tool in the toolbox of the researcher, writer, designer, artist, and creative person. It deserves further development as a creative tool with examples and applications.
Do you contrast and compare to learn, discover and create?
Refine, and iterate continuously. (iterative thinking)
Develop your view of each problem.
Find connections.
Organize problems hierarchically and by priority and scope.
Revise periodically.
My 12 Favorite Problems
This is version 2 of my 12 favorite problems:
how to be a good person
How to live a good life. (purpose/meaning)
How to make the best use of my time
What is happiness? How to understand it and live with and without it.
How to develop an interconnected system of habits to grow as a healthy, wealthy, and systemic human being, conscious citizens of the world, human being, member of humankind
Develop self-awareness, self-expression
How to stay healthy
How to make my life meaningful, worthwhile
How to have good relationships
How to take care of my family
how to be a good partner
how to be a good father
how to be a good son
how to be a good relative
how to be a good friend
how to be a good citizen of the World
How to spend more quality time with quality people
How to be a good thinker
how to be a good thinker
observation
recognizing patterns
cross-discipline / non-disciplinary
how to think about the future
how to make the best decisions
Learning
how to be a good learner
Communication
how to communicate in the best way
Storytelling
how to tell great stories
how to create great stories
Justice, equality, equanimity
What’s the right word?
How to create a just society
Make the world better
How to build a sustainable society
How to make a living while making the world a better place.
How to leave a positive, durable, compounding legacy
How to put new things in the world to make it better rather than worse
How to minimize unintended consequences
How to create better futures
How to improve the ecosystem’s health
Education
How to educate sons.
How to educate children.
How to educate human beings.
How to educate human beings for the best
How to learn
How to know more about what is unknown
How to be a good facilitator, coach, trainer, educator
How to be a good designer
How to understand, communicate, and manage complexity
How to minimize unintended consequences
Imagining alternative worlds
How to create networks of networks of changemakers creating a positive impact on people and the planet
How can I leave a legacy that will make me remembered in a positive way
How to imagine better futures
How to augment life
How to raise the collective intelligence
How to extend life, perception, augment intelligence, individual and collective.
How to live multiple lives
How to minimize the suffering of all living beings
When you compare the outcome of a production process with the original designs, you have a great learning chance.
You can learn how far you made it in realizing your initial intention. You can discover which area of improvement you could attack to improve the overall quality of the product. You recognize what is still missing to reach the intended objective.
Use the difference between the before and after to learn. Discover discrepancies by comparing the planned idea and its actual execution.
Did you do it on time? Is it respecting all the requirements and the constraints? Is it usable, accessible, effective, efficient?
The comparison between the original intention (the designs) and the current execution (the outcome) is a powerful method to make the system visible—the system of design and development, who imagined it and who built it, who sells it, and who uses it.
That delta generates the creative tension to fill the gaps, improve your building skills, refine the initial designs, test more and with a larger target audience, and stress the solution to make it more agile and robust.
So the habit of constantly checking how we are going compared to where we want to go is a crucial measurement of our progress. And it’s essential to identify the areas where we can improve or the aspects that we can curate better.
Learn how to improve in planning and building by comparing the intention against the execution. Compare the before and the after to see the difference. That discrepancy is your motivation to do better, and it gives you the direction to follow.
The habit of creating daily. It’s hard to make, but it’s not impossible. When you create every day, you will have the compounding effect, the snowball effect, at a certain time, to get in and to produce unexpected outcomes for you.
Like any habit to be built, it requires an effort. And starting it, it’s difficult.
You might feel like you will never make it, stupid, incapable, inept, and sad.
And that’s normal. Sometimes it’s even required because that’s how our brain reacts to change. Scientists have been proving that the reaction to doing something different is a feeling happening in the same part of the brain where we feel pain. So it’s not a metaphor saying that changing is painful.
To create a habit, you have to feel a certain amount of pain, but it’s not lethal. It’s not the end of the world. And the more you insist, the more you try, the more the pain becomes a joy.
Because the more you create it habitually, the more you feel self-aware, self-confident, the more you have ideas. When you do this kind of change, people around you will notice it. You will become more interesting. Things will happen around you. People will talk to you because they see something in you that they want. They see your effort in being creative, systematically.
Some people can do it on their own. They have strong willpower. The rest of the world needs help. Sometimes they need just a spark and a little push. Sometimes they need to be followed with a system.
That is what I’ve built with CREAZEE. It is a system to be consistently creative. To have ideas and to generate ideas about what to create. It’s also a community where you have peers, peer challengers wanting the same thing you want from which you can get inspiration and help and accountability. The group goes ahead together. Every day you are together with other people creating with you. So you feel part of a group having a common goal, and this is helping as well.
You should create every day anything that makes you feel alive. If you want to get a solid boost for your habit-making challenge, join us at CREAZEE.COM to be part of creative challenges.
I don’t believe in luck. I believe in the opportunities that I create. To build I need to work, a lot. I need to plant seeds, a lot of them, and seeing 99% of them wither.
It’s that less than 0,01% that gives returns. That changed my life. So I know I cannot be without doing something towards that little lucky-made seed.
But… But, but! But at the same time if I don’t carve a space to hear my thoughts I become a mindless executor who loses any taste in life. It would be just work and ambition. I would just burn out (and I did it many times so far).
So, when I have the luxury of doing absolutely nothing, oh man! At first, is disorienting, your work intoxicated brain looks for something to do, “to keep yourself busy”. Then you realize, I can “do nothing”! What the hell am I trying to do, here!
Oh, beautiful sensation and joy. That is Christmas! That is a celebration to me. Doing nothing.
It might endure too little but when I get those rare moments I am out of this world.
So, good life to you! Nurture, carve, find and cherish those moments of doing absolutely nothing.
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