Massimo Curatella

Tag: creativity

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
Notes on creativity and productivity with Ness Labs Community
Great session today on creativity, inspiration, productivity, workflow with Anne Laure Le Cunff of https://nesslabs.com/
My notes:
- Idea trails.
  https://trickle.app/ Lifelong learners are always dealing with information overload. Great sources of knowledge can be hard to find. Remembering what you’ve already learned can be even harder. Stop forgetting and start using Trickle.
- Observing others to get inspiration
- An information source is like a stream, I drink from it only when I am thirsty.
- Deleting stuff is important to fight the Collector Bias
- Getting Things Done (GTD). Waiting for the idea to come again
- Intentionality. I should collect and share ideas about my interests / focus
- Spaghetti method, throw a ball of ideas on the wall to see which stick https://www.the1thing.com/blog/the-one-thing/are-you-using-the-spaghetti-method-for-business-social-media/
- Problem of not going back to review notes.
- Validate your ideas by asking people
- Interstitial journaling. See Bucky
- Keeps everything you do: good or bad? How
- Inspiration is not ideas.
- Recurring ideas are not necessarily the best ones.
- “We tend to name things only when we have them fully formed.”
- Recognizing patterns, forgetting is also important. “Memory is a feature and not a bug”
- Building a critical mass of connected ideas.
- Having too many ideas. Struggle in finding a common thread. Concerned about building an audience while being eclectic
- What about curating sources, filtering inputs.
- you have good ideas if you have plenty of ideas
- you just have to curated and nurture them
- What’s the difference between ideas and inspiration?
- Add value to sparse ideas by connecting them.
24 June 2020
Perfectionism Killed my Creativity
I did too much. And I did nothing. This is the story of how being a perfectionist got me stuck. (Photo by John T on Unsplash)
Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision.
The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge
Writing every day is my most powerful creative tool.
Every day? You could ask.
How come you are writing every day and you publish on your blog every week? You could add.
And how come your latest article was in April? We’re almost in June. You could infer.
Yeah, I have excuses. So many I could fill you with them.
I wouldn’t even need all of my excuses, I could just mention the pandemic.
You know, that insignificant event taking over the world, recently?
But the truth is another.
Perfectionism.
This killed my publishing schedule.
While, when I write in my personal diary, I flow like oil. I can write from 1’000 to 5’000 words per hour. I’ve reached 250 days of continuous writing for 350’000 words. I can go on and on. I frequently reflect on my work (no, not necessary on why I am not blogging). I think aloud to better form some thoughts. It’s working in understanding better. Who? Me.
And, frequently, I talk (to myself) about those complex and abstract concepts that float in my mind. Day and night.
Which ones? I can hear you say.
Come on, the usual ones: UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, Design Systems, management, leadership, Organization Design, parenting, sustainability, Systems Thinking, complexity, emergence, feedback loops, causal diagrams, unintended consequences, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Systems Change, social innovation, facilitation, teaching, training, learning, consciousness, the mind, space, writing, thinking, publishing, building an audience, writing the next article, and some other 357 things.
Writing the next article. Yes. Let’s talk about this for a moment.
I’ve been “writing the next article” for more than a month, now.
It’s the next episode of the “OsservAgro” saga. It was one of the most stimulating experiences I had in 2019. I have a mountain of notes and ideas about it. And I committed to myself to tell its story. My experience. How I did it. What I’ve learned. What we did together. What we could do.
But I wanted to be a historian. I wanted to tell exactly what happened, who said what, what I replied, what I thought, what I did, and what we achieved at the end.
That is not an excellent way to summarize an experience. I am afraid.
The more I recalled about the first workshop I facilitated, the more I wrote.
The more I wrote, the more details I recalled.
The more I wrote the more ideas, facilitation methods, tricks, reflections came to my mind.
And the more I wrote.
So, after a month, what was a 1’000 thousand-words essay is now 5’000.
And I feel exhausted. And nausea comes to me if I reopen the third draft. I don’t want to publish it. It’s too long. It’s not flowing. And, the worst thing, I feel it’s… incomplete.
That is exactly where I am now. In the meantime, I’ve collected (just about) 1 extra million ideas. More drafts, more articles waiting to be written. The idea of creating a “digital mind garden” came to my mind because now it seems to be fashionable.
I’ve been dreaming about creating my Memex, my Wiki, my Second Digital Brain, since 1982. Not happy with being stuck, I did it. Now.
I am doing everything now. So, I am doing nothing. This is the truth. This is where I am. And this is what I am publishing now.
Will this writing help me? I’ve written it in 17 minutes, in one shot. I was “in the flow”. I reread it only once. I made only a few corrections.
Will I get unstuck? Am I getting unstuck?
28 May 2020