Massimo Curatella

Tag: creativity

Writing is combining
Why writing?
If you think better when you write, you need to write a lot to write well. So, to feel less lonely, albeit creative, lower your ambitions to keep being consistent. Do it small to do it better.
Writing brings a lot of benefits to your life because writing:
Writing is like drinking coffee, and it makes you creative and happy.
Transcribe your thoughts to become an effective communicator. Write daily to become a better manager.
Writing is a process, so it’s essential to automate repetitive tasks, publish the text as digital text, not images, and back up your work not to lose it.
If only I could be ten, again, I would write daily to build a habit, but I need to be smart, so I will let it go.
28 January 2021
Is your idea new?
A few decades ago, a friend asked me about creating a startup in the 3D Computer Graphics field. He pitched me the idea, and for every aspect of this software, I provided an example of something already existing.
While the execution makes the difference and nobody prevents you from starting any type of venture, you are at risk even if somebody else already did it. You could waste time, money, and resources by creating something existing or that nobody would buy.
A signal that the time has come for an idea is when you receive pitches or requests for advice about that idea from different fronts. It means that many people are thinking about it, either independently or because it went mainstream. It’s in the air. You can sense it.
In addition to a thorough market and competition research, it would help to study history. What did already solve our problem? Did it work? How did they have success? Is there space for innovation?
That’s why studying and researching your field of interest could give you an advantage. Or, if you think about it, you could even package your knowledge and make a product out of it.
History could save you a lot of time or could make you earn a lot of money.
How much do you know about history?
26 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.
22 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
Creativity preparation rituals: infallible!
Prime your brain with the ritual of preparation. You know that nothing can stop you when you’re cleaning up your mind and your environment to start doing creative work.
Finding the right preparation routine takes time and experimentation. You might start with one simple gesture and, since you have to repeat this for the rest of your life (right?), add, slowly, all the steps needed to bring you into the perfect creative environment.
What to do to get into a creative flow
This is non-scientific, personal, and maybe not suitable for you. It’s an example of how you could prepare yourself to do creative work.
Turn off all devices
Besides one using which you would be creating, of course. Do you work with rocks and scalpel? Good. Turn off all electronic devices emitting any form of sound, noise, or nuisance.
Warn your people. You’re not going to be reachable for the time you decide.
Agree with your important people that they can contact you for urgent matters. Like if that was needed to say. Define clearly what “urgent matters” means to you.
Turn off all notifications
What? Your phone is still on because it has a nuclear battery, and only specialists from Chernobyl would be able to switch it off? Then, put it in airplane mode. You can’t? Put it on mute, no vibration. (and explain to me, then, why you can’t turn it off)
Close all browser tabs
Why is your Web Browser open? If you need it for research, you are researching. You’re not writing. If, instead, you want to “be in the flow”, entirely concentrated on your productive medium, close all tabs. This would allow you to use an online text editor if any. Otherwise, use Notepad!
Minimize all user interfaces
So, I get it, your creating on your computer. Question: do you need all buttons, icons, menus, scrolling bars, toasters, pop-ups, reminders, notifications, slide-in menus, flying turtles, fighting Pokemons on your desktop? Remove, close, minimize, and hide anything not related, strictly, to your creative session.
Remove everything not strictly necessary for your creative task
I cannot think of anything else you might want to get rid of but, seriously, anything that does not answer positively to the question “do I need this to create?”, remove it.
Set a Pomodoro timer
It’s just a fancy way to say: set a timer to 25 minutes and start to do the freaking work.
Start to work
At this point, if it is the first time you’re going through this, you should have already spent quite a few minutes preparing for work. How do you feel in front of an excellent, shiny, blank page? Scary, uh? Isn’t it? You have no excuses. You have no distractions. It’s only you and your thoughts.
Listen to your thoughts
Waddaya say? You don’t know what to do? Shh, be silent for a second. Listen.
Listen.
Can you hear it?
If you’re lucky, you can hear absolutely nothing.
Try again.
Wait now. Can you start to hear something more?
See?
Do you know what you are finally hearing?
Let me introduce you to yourself!
Did you prepare well?
If you are scrupulous and lucky: at this point, you can hear your thoughts.
That’s what we were looking for.
Now there are absolutely no other options than listening to your mind talking.
Let it talk.
Let it go.
Can you keep the pace?
Listen to it. Now.
And, finally, damn! Write exactly what you are thinking!
Verbatim.
Don’t tell me you don’t know what to write anymore.
I will link you here, my friend.
12 January 2021
Rebranding the obvious
I used to create an index of ideas in the front matter and the back matter of books since the 80’s. Yes, I am that old. But I’ve never thought to brand it to give a unique name to it and desiring to be recognized as the inventor of the “idea index”.
Well, it seems like the “idea index” now is a unique technique invented and branded to list, exactly, the ideas found in a book.
I had the idea of the idea index years ago but I’ve never thought about calling it “Idea Index”.
I hate branding ideas since they are just notions about something that exists and everybody can know. Who brands ideas for the first time seems to get a sort of “Juris primae noctis“, they are the creators.
When you realize that that idea is something really simple or, worst, that you thought about for a long time you feel like… stupid.
Who re-brand ideas or brand them for the second time are either naive or presumptuous.
Why calling something already existing, known, and named with another name? Why creating redundancy and confusion in a VUCA World in which complexity and too many labels are dominating our clarity of vision?
Still, when you brand an idea is like you’ve conquered a bit of dirt in a new land (when it is new and when it is a land). It’s a sort of free but branded IP you can have your name attached to and bringing you popularity for your supposed discovery.
When is it worth to name and brand an idea? When shall we re-brand an existing and well-known idea?
10 January 2021
Planning revisions to prepare for reflection
You can’t always be in the flow and creating novel and useful ideas because you risk creating something that is neither novel nor useful.
I wrote about the need to stop and reflect, and, here I am, following my advice.
If not free-flow writing, what should I do, then?
A list of prompts for potential inspiration
1. Inventory, listing, enumerating.
2. Clustering, categorizing
3. Reviewing, revising, making a retrospective.
4. Reflecting, reorganizing.
5. Connecting, comparing.
6. Synthesizing, merging, making tangible.
In a moment of reflection, I am combining two ideas to enhance my creative workflow.
Execution? Not today.
3 January 2021
Creative technique: 1-2-3
Simplify: make your process a 1-2-3. First: set the context and prepare to work; second: develop your idea; third: package the final deliverable.
Sometimes we get lost in complication. We love to lose ourselves to the dance of complexity. It could be nice to live romantically in a floating world, a never-ending experience. But when poetry and romance are not fitting your constraints, better making it simple.
Think about writing:
1. Start with a catchy, brief, and impactful opening, stating the value of what you’re going to say.
2. Develop your idea. Sometimes you have three or four paragraphs to tell a story or to illustrate some examples.
3. Close with a bang! Restate your crucial point, reinforce, and call-to-action.
Think about teaching:
1. I tell you, and you listen
2. I tell you, and you do it
3. You do it, and I watch.
Simplicity helps to understand linearly. It also promotes iteration, and since “repetita juvant,” the more your repeat, the better you learn (with the right feedback loop, of course).
Think about designing:
1. Set your problem, learn your users.
2. Generate ideas, prototype, test, and refine.
3. Develop the final solutions and assess their validity.
It’s a simplification, yes, it is, but the creative exercise of summarizing in three points pushes you to be practical and pragmatical.
Think about exploring:
1. Explore the environment, understand the context.
2. Make a move, without getting hurt, in any direction. Test waters.
3. See what happens, react, adapt, and iterate.
There are so many frameworks inspired by those three steps, and you’ll find so many famous names directly bound to that: OODA, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Systemic Design, and Einstein knows what other.
Be brief in anything you do. When you can’t, play this game: can you say it and do it in 1-2-3? You’ll exercise your brevity, conciseness, and summarizing skills. First: set the problem; two: develop possibilities; three, implement, test, and iterate. Four: have fun.
Conception, ideation, implementation. And iteration.
27 December 2020
Creative technique: list ideas following a prompt
Listing and enumeration can be useful creative methods. Start with a clear prompt to drive idea generation with clarity, set a fixed time, constraints help creativity. Write one idea per post-it/note/node. When done, present each idea with one sentence to give context, and aggregate the explained ideas to create clusters by topic or other useful aggregating ideas.
This facilitated creativity activity is similar to the “Post-it, post-up” gamestorming tool.
Generating ideas about Problem-Solving
Thanks to Lady Bear, we’ve come up with a list of ideas related to the question, “What do you think and do when you have a problem to solve?”
The initial list.
A list of possible concepts, actions, ideas related to problem-solving, generated in 5 minutes:
1. Simplify
2. Count (inventory)
3. Separate
4. Order (Sort)
5. Trash (~~Thrash~~ would have been far more evocative but definitely out of context. Thanks to Brendan Seibel.)
6. Catalog
7. Knot, mark
8. Tie, connect
9. Be patient
10. Search
11. Find
12. Research
13. Ask
14. Situate, position
15. Place side by side
16. Observe
17. List (THIS!)
18. Present (put in the way so you can stumble upon it)
19. Memorize
20. Learn, understand and prevent
21. Visualize
22. Combine
23. Compare and contrast
24. Make a paragon
25. Imagine
26. Play
27. Tell a story
28. Beautify
29. Explain
30. Do not procrastinate
It’s hugely satisfying to spend no more than 10 minutes with another person to come up with raw creative material to work on. That’s what it took to create the previous list.
List, enumerate, itemize, count, inventory.
When you’re stuck and don’t know where to start from, take a partner and play to list their ideas following a clear and concise starting question. You will have the maximum creative outcome with the minimum effort.
26 December 2020