Massimo Curatella

Tag: networks

Connect ideas now
Writing every day for 365 days, I’ve learned that Information hoarding is too easy.
If you don’t make an effort in connecting thoughts to grow your network of knowledge, you are just moving things from a container to another.
Writing does good to you, but it’s not enough. If you dump your brain to paper and then digitize it into a Note-Taking App, If you don’t curate your thoughts, it is just moving things around with a lot of extra logistical work to do, additional time, more stress, and very little added value.
Instead, you should focus on the real value of the piece of information you’ve produced, and you should connect it now, not tomorrow or in 10 years. If you do it now, you will have a fresh memory of it, you’ll be motivated to find connections, and you will have given a positive contribution to your network of ideas.
Fluid Networked Thinking requires the willpower to do the entire workflow at once: capture new ideas, connect them with existing ones, construct new knowledge.
If you save-it-to-read-later, you will risk contributing to the cognitive mess you are trying to fight with your Personal Knowledge Management system.
Capture and connect your new ideas now. There’s no other time to do it.
Information hoarding is too easy. Capture and connect your new ideas now. There’s no other time to do it.
This is Essay 7 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)
22 November 2020
Writing builds your networks
Writing every day for 365 days, I’ve met new interesting people and made friends. And I shared publicly only one-tenth of what I wrote.
I’ve met:
- Systems Changers, applying Systems Thinking to make our world a better place.
- Researchers and practitioners of Collective Intelligence, promoting more inclusive participation in Society.
- Scientists and scientific researchers, looking to engage the diverse participation of citizens, teachers, entrepreneurs, and consumers in the imagination of more sustainable futures.
- Personal Knowledge Management experts, disseminating their passion for ideas and how to have them.
- Writers, professionals, and amateurs, lovers of the written expressions and coaches.
- Bloggers, Podcasters, influencers, making their thoughts and their words visible and accessible to a wide audience, creating networks of ideas and relationships.
- Students, desiring to learn, sharing their knowledge while they’re doing it.
- Designers, looking to have an impact going beyond the services and products they ideate.
- Teachers, instructors, and trainers striving to leave a mark on their followers by planting seeds for trees they know they will never sit under to enjoy their shade.
- Visionaries, investors, entrepreneurs, and Future Thinkers, working hard to make better futures possible.
How is it possible? Writing, you become an interesting person with stimulating questions, engaging stories to tell. Even if you are not publishing your writing, your thoughts increase in clarity, structure, in solidity. Think about the possibility of sharing the best of them: can you imagine the potential?
Extrovert or introvert? Doesn’t matter. Make your thoughts visible, you’ll grow your network.
Extrovert or introvert? Doesn’t matter. make your thoughts visible, you’ll grow your network.
This is Essay 6 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)
21 November 2020
Networking by communicating your challenge
Focusing on a specific mission is hard. If you’re not clear about it it’s even harder to communicate it. This is how it went with my presentation to Ozan Varol’s Inner Circle.
Connecting with Smart Strangers
I was invited by Ozan Varol to an online meeting to share my challenges with his Inner Circle Community.
I use to commit myself to slightly embarrassing challenges to push me to get prepared. One of my tricks to learn, better and faster. Another one is to teach what you want to learn. The call was about asking for help with one of your challenges, members from the Inner Circle community would come to brainstorm solutions and give you help.
While the poor Ozan was asking for a simple and straightforward question to ask my kind voluntary good-doers, I started to think about the meaning of life and why the Universe exists.
Don’t you believe me?
This was my original draft: “challenges-to-discuss”.
If we are all on this ride together: Is it worth caring about questions that are not the most important ones?
How can I live a more intentional life?
How can I be financially sustainable while creating something which will outlive me and be remembered as a positive contribution to the progress of society and improvement of life on the Planet?
How can I reach as many people as possible and increase the quality of their lives through education?
How to dance with uncertainty?
How to become an intervener in my reality?
How to provide value and to whom?
How can I engage, being useful, without being boring?
How can I use the opportunity of raising children to improve my worldview, my beliefs, and my values?
Not bad as “informal” and “quick” questions to submit to never met before people, kindly dedicating from 15 to 30 minutes of their time to listen to you…
With infinite diplomacy skills, Ozan made me notice that I would have needed one, two paragraphs, maximum, to introduce my challenge to be discussed.
Pushed to reduce my philosophical worldview to something more manageable I tried to focus on what are the most urgent themes dear to me. And I got this shortened list:
How can I keep the habit of Writing every day.? I Wrote for 140 days, about 200’000 words
How can I Publish every week?
Walking at least 1’000 km per year. How can I sustain my habit?
How can I Make a living as an independent publisher and professional?
Obviously (dear me), this was not short enough. So while meeting with a client, replying to emails and chatting with friends (it was a calm day) I really felt inappropriate to reach meeting time with so ambitious challenges to share.
With a lot of effort and a bit of pain, I’ve tried to focus on the single most important step I wanted to validate among the many in my grand vision.
And finally, it started to make sense.
This is what I finally submitted:
Consider that I want to become financially independent by publishing, primarily on my blog at https://curatella.com and to grow as a professional who is contributing to raising the collective intelligence through design, education, and facilitation.
If you visit my home page and you read in particular the sentence:
“Hi, I am Max. Here you can learn more about design, writing, facilitation, and teaching.”
Which are linked words, would you hire me as a facilitator?
What can I do to improve my presentation?
But it was too late!
Meeting time arrived and I had to introduce myself, my blog and my challenge by speaking, I scratched almost anything I’ve prepared and I’ve asked the group:
If you read my article at:
Facilitation is the process of learning together
Facilitation is the set of structured and collaborative activities organized to discover, understand and learn together. The facilitator helps a group of people and decision-makers to face complex problems, producing a collective intelligence more powerful than each individual could do, alone.
1. Would you think it is too pushy and sales-y?
2. Would you hire me as a facilitator?
The feedback gathered
The great patience of the participants allowed me to get precious feedback which was:
1. I have too many doubts about publishing. I should just write and publish without too much thinking.
2. Even if I reduced my fields of interest to the four appearing in the Home page, I should either reduce them down to a more focussed one or find a more digestible and clear way to communicate the common thread binding them all.
3. I should write article drafts and leave them unpublished for some days. Then, with fresh eyes, I should edit those drafts pretending they have been written by somebody else.
4. I should enjoy more of the process of writing and publishing for the pure sake of it.
5. Only by publishing a lot of content, I will be able to find my voice and fine-tune my content strategy while understanding better how to relate to my audience.
I really enjoyed this improvised and unprepared collaboration. I got inspiration and motivation to write more and better and I’ve also found a more focussed challenge to face in my writing path: to be more spontaneous and to find a way to present an eclectic and multi-perspective content strategy.
Thanks to: Ozan Varol, Christina, Cathy Cheng and all the other participants of the Inner Circle.
Well, now is your turn: what is your question for me about my writing at https://curatella.com?
16 February 2020