Massimo Curatella

Tag: creativity

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
Constrain your creativity to make it easy
When trying to build a daily writing habit, setting creative constraints can immensely help in your game. When I’ve challenged myself to write every day for one year, privately, and then to publish for 30 days, publicly, I’ve found helpful the strategic use of limitations.
Set the creative constraints to write no more than 250 words. Or 500 words. Or to write for at least 30 minutes and no more than one hour.
Define the template for your article. Think about the usual storytelling format: introduction (stating the context), development (raising attention on one issue, proposing solutions), conclusion (wrapping up with observations).
The 1-2-3 format is what I’ve used at least 30 times in my challenge, Shipping 30 Atomic Essays for 30 days.
While I’ve rejected the screenshot format because highly inaccessible and unusable, I come up with a three-parts (plus the title) format that I’ve immediately found workable:
- Clear and concise title giving a direct direction
- Introduction. The writing challenge’s broader context and one sentence summarizing the issue as if it were a subtitle.
- Development. Treatment of the topic with a logical and incremental progression in supporting the initial statement. Sometimes it’s a short story, and others are a list of examples, evidence, or applications.
- Conclusion. Further reinforcement of the initial statement, reworded with an effort to build a punch line closing in a crescendo.
Having a format to follow, even when flexible and loose, gives the quick sprint of taking care of the topic without worrying about the structure. It gives pace and logical flow. When you get fluid with the format, you can become very efficient in writing 200-300 words in less than 30 minutes.
And when you look at what you wrote in that nicely formatted article, with exact steps in your narration, going from a punchy title, an immersive introduction, an engaging development to an impactful conclusion, you feel good.
Relationships between parts let emerge formal beauty out of simple rules.
22 December 2020
What to write when you don’t know what to write
What should I write now?
If you find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to write, you can leverage on your drafts, your notes, or your creative toolbox.
Why don’t you know what to write? Haven’t you been writing a free-flowing draft every day? No? That’s the first problem. If you build a habit of writing every day by transcribing your thoughts, you won’t have an ideas shortage. It’s easy and comfortable, and it’s packaged creativity. You don’t even have to think. Look into your draft archive or even your Zettelkasten, if you know what it is, and randomly pick one piece of writing.
Don’t you like it? Well, my friend, we’re here because you don’t know what to write. Don’t you think you’re pushing a bit too much? Trust the system. You’re cashing-in your investment, pick a draft, revise it, and publish it. That’s it.
Oh, I get it. You have no drafts in your archive. Well, that will require a bit of extra work, but we can fix it as well. So, go and pick the first creative prompt from your writing tools archive. What? Don’t you have such a thing? OK. So let’s create it now.
Ready?
Write ten questions in 60 seconds. Yeah, one minute, no second thoughts, no waiting, just set a timer and go!
1. What did you do today?
2. What caught your attention?
3. What’s the most fun thing somebody told you?
4. What did you dream last night?
5. What would you like to be in one year?
6. Who do you want to meet in 10 years?
7. Who changed your life, and you never told them?
8. If you had all the money in the world, what would you do?
9. What great mind of the past would you like to talk to?
10. What’s the last thought you want to think before you die?
Done? See? Was it easy?
OK, now let’s get back to the initial problems: we have no drafts in our archive and no creative prompts. What do you say? Do we have them? Oh, right! We just wrote the two things.
- An article about what to write when you don’t have any ideas
- An initial toolbox of creative writing prompts to jumpstart your drafts
Well, thank you for pointing me at those. So, what’s next? Nothing! We did it.
Congratulations, my friend. Come back again, any time!
18 December 2020
Creativity makes you happy
Writing every day for 365 days, I’ve learned that writing makes me happier.
Escaping the daily routine by diving into a creative world of exploration and discovery is an infinite well of positive feelings.
Fighting the fleeting moment of intuitions and collecting great little gems of intelligence, you go from eating junk food to curate your content consumption diet.
It’s only by making an effort to squeeze your mental juice that you can realize the infinite potential of your brain. New authors, articles, books, courses, discussions, or just that bent ray of light coming through your window can spark the joy of creation.
Don’t be your enemy while creating. Go in the flow and with the flow. Let your ideas dance and have sex together. Your smooth neurons are made for flying. Let them float in the ethereal void of your boundless mind.
Connect similar concepts. Send contrasting thoughts to the fight. Put your shiny pearls of ideas in a line, and you will create joyous jewels to cherish. What about bright networks of mental golden nuggets?
What shall you do with all of this wonder? Write! Write your thoughts down. Keep them. Scratch them. Connect them. Share them.
You won’t be able to contain your happiness.
Imagining new and better futures, visualizing conceptual connections, and writing them, you will be happier.
Imagining new and better futures, visualizing conceptual connections, and writing them, you will be happier.
This is Essay 15 of 30 in the my challenge One Year Writing: 30 Lessons Learned in 30 Days
1. The Journey is the Purpose (16 Nov 2020)
2. Writing is Thinking (17 Nov 2020)
3. Write a Lot to Write Well (18 Nov 2020)
4. Creative Loneliness (19 Nov 2020)
5. Be Less Ambitious, Be More Consistent (20 Nov 2020)
6. Writing builds your networks (21 Nov 2020)
7. Connect ideas now (22 Nov 2020)
8. Writing improves your memory (23 Nov 2020)
9. Writing makes you a better observer (24 Nov 2020)
10. Writing sets the focus on yourself (25 Nov 2020)
11. Dissolve your distractions (26 Nov 2020)
12. Writing reduces your jargon and slang (27 Nov 2020)
13. Walking generates ideas (28 Nov 2020)
14. Writing is like drinking coffee (29 Nov 2020)
15. Creativity makes you happy (30 Nov 2020)
16. Be smart, let it go (1 Dec 2020)
17. Writing is a process (2 Dec 2020)
18. Automate repetitive tasks (3 Dec 2020)
19. Publish text as digital text, not images (4 Dec 2020)
20. Why asking questions? (5 Dec 2020)
21. Facilitate growth by tracking habits (6 Dec 2020)
22. Type more, type faster, type better (7 Dec 2020)
23. Transcribe your thoughts to become an effective communicator (8 Dec 2020)
24. Write daily to become a better manager (9 Dec 2020)
25. Do it small to do it better (10 Dec 2020)
26. Don’t lose your mind. Back it up (11 Dec 2020)
27. Write daily to enhance your reality (12 Dec 2020)
28. If only I could be ten, again (13 Dec 2020)
29. Writing compounds despite everything (14 Dec 2020)
30. The habit of building habits (15 Dec 2020)
30 November 2020
Walking generates ideas
Writing every day for 365 days, I’ve learned that the more I walk, the more I have ideas.
What’s the biggest muscle you have? Well, it would be exciting, but no, it’s not what you think. It’s your legs. The more you walk, the more you make use of your legs and the more effort you do with your body’s most prominent muscles.
Doing physical exercise is an activity that generates neurons. Yes, the more you work out your body, the more your brain grows.
Walking, in the open, in a beautiful city or the countryside or on the beach, has the additional benefit of detaching your eyes from bright screens. You see leaves, people, buildings, trees, children going to school, drivers cursing to other drivers, shop owners taking care of your groceries, birds singing, and, well, I think you’ve got it. (It’s a wonderful world).
Walking outside gives a break to your brain while regenerating its tired cells. It’s a great opportunity to have your mind wandering. Yes, of course, you will have those nasty thoughts to emerge. But looking at the horizon, enjoying the warmth of the sun while being gently caressed by a good smelling breeze, do wonder.
Acknowledge your thoughts and put them away. Or reflect on how to improve your situation. Better? OK, after a while, walking, you will start to have ideas about anything that is within your attention: work, play, love, the future, the past, a new venture, a new article, new friends, jokes, games to play with your children.
If you walk you are a different person: a calm, attentive, creative human being, listening to the environment while discovering new ideas in your thoughts.
This is Essay 13 of 30 in the my challenge One Year Writing: 30 Lessons Learned in 30 Days
1. The Journey is the Purpose (16 Nov 2020)
2. Writing is Thinking (17 Nov 2020)
3. Write a Lot to Write Well (18 Nov 2020)
4. Creative Loneliness (19 Nov 2020)
5. Be Less Ambitious, Be More Consistent (20 Nov 2020)
6. Writing builds your networks (21 Nov 2020)
7. Connect ideas now (22 Nov 2020)
8. Writing improves your memory (23 Nov 2020)
9. Writing makes you a better observer (24 Nov 2020)
10. Writing sets the focus on yourself (25 Nov 2020)
11. Dissolve your distractions (26 Nov 2020)
12. Writing reduces your jargon and slang (27 Nov 2020)
13. Walking generates ideas (28 Nov 2020)
14. Writing is like drinking coffee (29 Nov 2020)
15. Creativity makes you happy (30 Nov 2020)
16. Be smart, let it go (1 Dec 2020)
17. Writing is a process (2 Dec 2020)
18. Automate repetitive tasks (3 Dec 2020)
19. Publish text as digital text, not images (4 Dec 2020)
20. Why asking questions? (5 Dec 2020)
21. Facilitate growth by tracking habits (6 Dec 2020)
22. Type more, type faster, type better (7 Dec 2020)
23. Transcribe your thoughts to become an effective communicator (8 Dec 2020)
24. Write daily to become a better manager (9 Dec 2020)
25. Do it small to do it better (10 Dec 2020)
26. Don’t lose your mind. Back it up (11 Dec 2020)
27. Write daily to enhance your reality (12 Dec 2020)
28. If only I could be ten, again (13 Dec 2020)
29. Writing compounds despite everything (14 Dec 2020)
30. The habit of building habits (15 Dec 2020)
28 November 2020