The articles I wrote this week:

• Morellino di Scansano
  Alcohol is bad for health. Prove me wrong and I’ll invite you for a drink.
• Give Me Endless Stories
  I don’t like the end of stories. Why shall I interrupt being transported in another world and another time?
• Write About your Fears, to Be Stronger
  Writing contributes to making you more self-aware and better equipped to make sense of your experiences. It can be a great tool to research the causes of your feelings.
• Do you want to lead better? Write
  Avoid leading your team to confusion: write down your problem and illustrate a vision, a strategy, and a plan to solve it.
• Dream Big, Build It Small, but Daily
  Start now by doing a little thing, and keep on doing it, every day. You’ll reach the stars without even realizing it.
• Plan Your Creativity
  Planning is an activity bringing the future to the present. You cannot plan to be creative but to foster the conditions for you to be creative.

Come writing with me.

The joy of being CREAZEE.

It seems like an eon ago I was struggling to launch my first online writing challenge. It was only 4 days ago. 16 people are writing every day. They’ve created so far about 60 articles. In an exercise to produce 100 ideas each we ended up creating more than 1’000 ideas. What I was thinking to be a group of people exploring light ways to create revealed itself as an exceptional mix of sharp minds and deep hearts.

I am astonished and a bit overwhelmed. Where will this lead? It’s a powerful life experiment that will have a profound impact on a few lives. Mine, for sure.

Are you curious? Have a look.

In addition to a few hundred messages exchanged with Challengers, this week, I also wrote:

1. How to Overcome Writer’s Block, by Adam Grant
2. I am ready, I am CREAZEE
3. To be Creative, Automate and Simplify
4. Containing Large Multitudes
5. Stop Overthinking and Start
6. The Challenge to Create is Hard

See you next week.

Max.

Sunday is perfect for writing. Why not writing every day?

And you should build a habit to write every day.

On the 1st of April 2021, I will launch a Daily Writing Habit Challenge at CREAZEE, my new website.

You’re invited to participate at a discounted price.

The outcome of my daily writing habit brought his fruit, this week also, I’ve split my publishing between creazee.com and curatella.com. For your convenience, these are my recent articles:

Write now to think better. Writing is thinking, remembering, focusing, collecting, and reflecting. Writing is augmenting and expanding thinking through time.

Write what you care about. What do you care about? That’s what you have to write. It’s the most powerful and immediate way to face the complex challenges of our times.

Write About your 12 Favorite Problems. When you don’t know what to write, you should get inspiration from your 12 favorite problems.

My 12 Favorite Problems. You should always be working on a dozen of your favorite problems. What are yours?

Never run out of ideas. How can you always have ideas to write about? You need to cultivate them. Overcome the thrill of ideation, get unstuck, fill in 100 rows with ideas.

I will make you write every day. I will use any means, trick, method, tool, approach to making you write every day. Some of them will work, some others will not.

I will make you write every day. Don’t you believe me?

Ciao,

I’m Max, and every week I am sharing in this newsletter the articles I’ve been writing during the week. Sometimes I reflect aloud about what I’ve published to make sense of trends. Some others, I tell you stories about my online adventures. 

This time, I have two accomplishments to share with you.

Another Daily Writing Challenge Completed!

With friends from Ness Labs, I have been blogging for 28 days straight. Not that I have ever stopped since my first challenge, but it was entertaining to have peers writing with me.

The final rush was composed of the same articles taking me to have written 118 pieces in a row.

And they are:

Start to create, now

What was the most critical event determining my 117 daily articles written and published in a row? Starting.

Living in Information by Jorge Arango, book review

There is a strong parallel between the characteristics and the influences of physical places on our lives and what worlds of information living in immaterial di…

Daily Writing Habit Learning Challenge, a first draft

Challenge yourself to build a daily writing habit. Here is the alpha version draft outline. Let’s learn together.

Find a balance between theory and practice, management and execution

Get out of the office, put down your phone and see if you can do some practical work in your field. You’ll have immense benefits.

Open questions vs. Closed questions

Ask closed questions to have quick confirmation without provoking further discussion. Ask open questions to explore, learn and facilitate richer conversations.

Daily writing doesn’t make it automatically good

On top of the continuity, you need to create valuable content. When is the right time to assess what you have written?

I am Launching MY Writing Challenge: CREAZEE, uh?

The best news of the week is that I am launching my Writing Challenge. I’ve been receiving the interest of a few people wanting to build a habit of writing daily, and I thought it would have been nice to have a community of challengers to play with.

Discover everything about it at CREAZEE.COM

Writing About Writing and Design

Ciao,

I’m Max, and every week I am sharing in this newsletter the articles I’ve been writing during the week. Sometimes I reflect aloud about what I’ve published to make sense of trends. Some others, I tell you stories about my online adventures. This week I have two clear topics to share with you and a hint about a new project I am cooking.

Keep on reading to know more about it.

And now, the articles I’ve published this week.

Writing About Writing

Wouldn’t it be fantastic to have somebody listening to you when you have something to say? Pleased to meet you.

You can change your future by acting today. Rather than focusing on an abstract person in an intangible setting, think more about your future self.

When you build a habit of writing every day, you have a part of your brain reserved for a fixed thought. You have to write. Write, now.

Change the context of those lessons learned that you cannot share. And share the knowledge without betraying your friends. Use abstraction to tell a story.

Writing About Design

Test your ideas with quick and cheap prototypes as early and as frequently as possible. Prototype for maximum learning and minimum effort.

Do not follow your intuition alone. You are not your users. Put yourself in their shoes. Design your success. Design with your users in mind.

Are you struggling to write every day?

You are a subscriber of Curatella.com Updates.

I’ve learned a lot by writing 100 articles, and I could not stop.

This is my 111th daily article in a row.

Would you like to write every day as I do?

Hit reply to this message and I will tell you more about it.

It means I’ve made my daily writing habit stronger.

Welcome to Curatella.com’s Weekly Updates.

I am celebrating my 100 daily blog posts in a row, and I’ve taken some time to reflect on what it means and how it could drive my future choices. I had a great experience in trusting other brains with my challenges as they did themselves with mine. It gave me the right motivation to think about transforming my daily writing habit into a learning experience—more on this in the following weeks. I’ve decided to recognize my tendency to write about writing. It will drive the reorganization of content on my website. And, finally, I had some real-life experience of being in a hospital during pandemic times.

This is a transformative time for me, and I would appreciate your thoughts on what I am doing with curatella.com. What’s resonating with you? What do you want to see more developed? What is constructively changing your thinking?

Hit the reply button and send me a message with your thoughts about it. Now.

The Digest

Two separate groupings of what I wrote this week.

The first is by topic.

Writing About Writing

What I’ve learned by publishing 100 articles in a row – A reflection on the best lessons learned by writing and publishing an article every day for 100 days.

Feed your daily creative habit – Your daily habit is like a baby. You cannot forget to feed it. It would die. Go feed yourself.

Writing is King, Long Life to Writing – A revised content strategy to focus more on writing and the daily habit of writing online.

Of Course! – Will you like this article?

Experiencing Collective Intelligence

Brain Trust Pioneers. The Report. – Bright minds convene to transform each other’s lives through facilitated feedback on concrete challenges.

Reflections on Our Society

I’m fine, but I am not sure about us – Design could elevate hospitals to Temples of Humanity instead of wells of desperation.

The Digest with Pictures

The second is a reverse-chronological list with illustrations.

Feed your daily creative habit

Your daily habit is like a baby. You cannot forget to feed it. It would die. Go feed yourself.

I’m fine, but I am not sure about us

Design could elevate hospitals to Temples of Humanity instead of wells of desperation.

Writing is King, Long Life to Writing

A revised content strategy to focus more on writing and the daily habit of writing online.

What I’ve learned by publishing 100 articles in a row

A reflection on the best lessons learned by writing and publishing an article every day for 100 days.

Of Course!

Will you like this article?

Brain Trust Pioneers. The Report.

Bright minds convene to transform each other’s lives through facilitated feedback on concrete challenges.

See you next week on Curatella.com

Hello Networked Thinkers,

this is your weekly digest including all articles I’ve published on https://curatella.com.

I can see a story unfolding:

1. How to be more intentional and conscious about learning.
2. Going slower to digest knowledge deeper.
3. Sharing the process in a “Learning Out Loud” fashion.
4. Connecting more and more with like-minded people (are you in?)
5. Slowly adding building blocks to a customized Personal Knowledge Management System
6. Extention of the quest to the research: who has done already work in the field?

My Ask for you

What do you like of what I am sharing through my blog and my newsletter?

What would you like to read more about?

Just hit the REPLY button and talk to me.

And now, the article I’ve posted this week:

Knowledge Entrepreneurs: Brain Trust Day 1

Experts in diverse fields convene to provide structured feedback to each participant’s challenge in a reciprocal way.

Describe your knowledge capturing process to improve it

Stop hoarding useless mountains of data. Reflect on your bad habits by documenting them step-by-step. Drop useless actions. Repeat.

The Seeker

I’m looking for me. You’re looking for you. We’re looking in at other. And we don’t know what to do

Knowledge Entrepreneurs Salon 11: Start With Community

I’ve found the best place in the world. It’s called The Internet.

Experiential Education webinar with Jake Fee

Transforming experience into learning with John’Dewey’s Pattern of Inquiry and some areas of application.

Capture information, extract prompts and curate a collection of ideas in your PKM

Capture information, extract prompts and curate a collection of ideas in your PKM.

And you… are…?

Thanks for asking:

Hi, I am Massimo Curatella.

I am a Strategic Designer and a Facilitator. I write about design, education, facilitation, and Systems Thinking.

Some highlights from my website curatella.com:

• One Year Writing: 30 Lessons Learned in 30 Days. My challenge to publish 30 atomic essays in 30 days. 
• Writing Half a Million words in One Year. I have been writing for my 365th day in a row, for a total of half a million words.
• The habit of building habits
• Notes. A growing collection of notes, reflections, and connections.
• My notes about Systems Thinking
• All articles about Design
• All articles about Facilitation
• All articles about Writing
• All articles about Systems Thinking

Do you want to know more?

Of Course!

Hello Network(ed) Thinkers,

Weeks pass by like clouds on a windy day, and topics start to stick like balls of spaghetti thrown on the wall. I’ve found convergence in the force. After the impulse of learning out loud about data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, I’ve checked my braindump with more intentional research on the same topic. It was helpful and fun. The loci argumentorum inspired my first investigation into why we are capturing knowledge, and they also led me to explore what I am capturing. I’ve made I was not acting as a good systems thinker by isolating the two perspectives. Still, I’ve reconciled them by analyzing the process of capturing a digital flow-chart image.

I see a thread in my explorations and connections between each adventure. I feel I am charting a known territory while looking at it with my eyes through different lenses. I am quite satisfied with the idea of filling in the blanks in a map to be explored. And I feel even more stimulated by the idea of leaving traces and spaces to connect observations into more significant knowledge objects.

Thanks for your attention.

And don’t forget, there are also minimal, abstract, and sometimes surreal illustrations.

This week on curatella.com

Capturing diagram images in your PKM System

Store images related to your interests and connect them to possible future use scenarios.

A systems thinker thinks in systems about systems

Systems Thinking emerges from considering the relationships and the interactions between all components of the observed system.

What am I capturing: data, information, or knowledge?

A note captured is usually something that will need further processing, and it’s seldom something we could use as it is.

Why capturing knowledge?

Capturing data, information, and knowledge depends on your vision and your character.

What is data, information, knowledge, and wisdom?

By giving context to raw data, you obtain information. Knowledge is information connected. Wisdom is knowledge applied to decision-making.

Learning Out Loud: Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom

I’m doing a crazy experiment. Instead of researching and reporting, I will write down what I know about data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Who are you, Max?

Thanks for asking:

Hi, I am Massimo Curatella.

I am a Strategic Designer and a Facilitator. I write about design, education, facilitation, and Systems Thinking.

Some highlights from my website curatella.com:

• One Year Writing: 30 Lessons Learned in 30 Days. My challenge to publish 30 atomic essays in 30 days. 
• Writing Half a Million words in One Year. I have been writing for my 365th day in a row, for a total of half a million words.
• The habit of building habits
• Notes. A growing collection of notes, reflections, and connections.
• My notes about Systems Thinking
• All articles about Design
• All articles about Facilitation
• All articles about Writing
• All articles about Systems Thinking

See you next week (or now?)

Now!

What was the name of that incredible pizzeria?

Hello, friends!

This is our weekly meeting to recap what I’ve been publishing on my blog. I had great experiences meeting new people, exchanging ideas and thoughts with bright minds, and finding the time and the inspiration to make some little drawings.

The recurring topic was: Personal Knowledge Management, what is it and how to do it. I am quite happy with the articles I wrote without research, improvised. I am full of knowledge to be managed! I see a nice continuity in some threads, much less in others. The beauty of non-linear writing is exactly this: connect articles related to the same topics. With time and patience, they will accumulate, and you will have the opportunity to develop them further.

What’s your favorite one? Why? Reply to this email and let me know your interests.

Following, please find a list of the article published this week on https://curatella.com

A Personal Knowledge Management workflow

Capture and organize information. Develop and share ideas. Grow your PKM system to be more efficient and creative.

George Orwell wrote for selfishness, aesthetics, history, and politics

Exactly as I am.

Something small, every day

That’s the best I can do today. Doing it is more important than the result.

Share your content wisely

I have been linking my daily posts everywhere. I’ve been doing it wrong. Here’s a step back.

What is Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)?

A basic PKM system could be created with digital files and folders, but it’s much more than that.

Questions. About the present. About the future.

You cannot always look for answers. What are your questions?

Come visit me! No precautions required!

Meet my mind

But also innovation, design, and philosophy.

It’s the most classical Curatella style, ever. How could you go wrong?

Did you have the chance to try to make sense of my daily publishing, this week?

No? No problem!

Only for you, my dear subscribers, a digest of my latest daily articles.

Instructions for living a creative life

Creating, you become an interesting person with stimulating questions and engaging stories to tell.

Systems Thinking offers the most effective and efficient mental model of reality

We can think in systems to analyzing the day-to-day problems and address global challenges as the Climate Crisis or poverty.

Writing is combining

If you build your library of ideas, you can combine them into new writings.

Gardens of Knowledge and Gardens of Expertise

Offer your expertise in a curated virtual space where you give access to the best of your knowledge.

Is your idea new?

History could save you a lot of time or could make you earn a lot of money. How much do you know about history?

There are no problems

When a problem can’t be solved, it’s not a problem. When a problem can be solved, it’s not a problem

Think about what we’ll think about of this, in 10 years.
Will you be there?
Will you remember?

In the meantime: