“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” — Inventing the Future, Dennis Gabor, 1963
In recent years, I have embraced a habit that has radically transformed how I think and learn: every day, I reflect, write, and capture ideas that inspire me. But it wasn’t always this way.
Once, my mind was a vortex of stimuli: articles, videos, conversations—a continuous stream of information dissolving into chaos. Imagine trying to hold sand in a sieve too large. Every grain slipped away, leaving me with a sense of incompleteness and fragmentation.
The real transformation began when I decided to create a digital space to bring coherence to my ideas. This space is not just an archive but an intellectual haven where every thought finds a place, ready to be reworked and connected to others. It has been a gradual process—built through trial, error, and continuous improvement—but each step has brought me closer to a system that makes my learning meaningful.
Now, I find myself at a new crossroads. I no longer want to simply gather and organize; I want to create. In the past, I wrote spontaneously for my blog and newsletter, rarely drawing on my notes and focusing on the immediacy of writing. At most, I refined a draft, without worrying about connecting ideas or weaving them with previous articles. The change I want to introduce now in my creative process is to capitalize on an active archive of interconnected thoughts. I want to transform what I’ve accumulated into something tangible, useful, and meaningful. This requires time, dedication, and above all, persistence—a reminder that true creativity is not a fleeting spark but a deliberate act.
I cannot predict the future, but I can invent possible ones. Every step forward, every connection between ideas, is an act of building.
On this journey toward intentional creation, I recognize patience as my greatest ally. Each day is an opportunity to add another piece, to shape the mosaic I am building. I am ready to face this challenge, one idea at a time.
I share these thoughts, admittedly, for myself. It’s a way of tracking my progress and ambitions with an increased accountability. It gives me an extra motivation to keep working on them. It frightens me to conclude with a declaration of commitment, a provocative question that pushes me toward the direction I am envisioning. Yet, perhaps that’s the right reason to be courageous and launch it—aimed at myself, to be answered tomorrow.
Welcome back to our exploration of the creative journey. In our previous discussions, we navigated the vast seas of Personal Knowledge Management, likening it to charting and mapping unknown archipelagos. We delved into how gathering and organizing information is akin to discovering and mapping new lands. Continuing this voyage, let’s shift our gaze from the maritime expanse to the skies above. In this issue, we explore the similarity of the creative process to the awe-inspiring formation of lightning, drawing parallels between the natural phenomenon and the spark of creativity.
The Dynamics of Creativity
In the realm of creation, a transformative instant breathes life into mere thoughts, birthing tangible realities. The nature of lightning offers a captivating lens through which to view this process, unveiling the enigmatic and awe-inspiring journey of creativity.
Formation of Ideas
Creativity springs forth from the gathering of diverse stimuli—readings, conversations, and experiences—akin to the birth of ideas. Each fragment of information and interaction contributes to the rich tapestry of thoughts, much like how warm, moist air rises, cools, and transforms into the building blocks of inspiration.
Coagulation of Ideas
Inside the clouds of creativity, ideas collide, mix, and divide, creating a tension akin to the separation of electric charges in a cumulonimbus cloud—the ebb and flow of creative energy. This tension becomes the crucible in which ideas take on a positive or negative charge, culminating in a crescendo of creative potential.
Creative Tension
As the potential difference in a storm cloud grows, so does the creative tension between ideas. This gap is a crucial moment in the need to express, create, and transform. It’s the point where the accumulation of elements, whether electric charge in the atmosphere or information and ideas in the mind of a creator, becomes so intense that a spark is inevitable. This is the pivotal moment when a surge of ideas, much like a lightning bolt, forges connections and seeks expression.
Idea Selection
Just as a lightning bolt extends its luminous tendrils, the creative idea branches out, seeking its most direct path to realization. The creative spark, much like the stepping leader in a lightning strike, is where an idea stands out, finding the most direct path to expression. Amidst the myriad of potential concepts, one emerges as the focal point, ready to be nurtured and developed. As a lightning bolt makes its way to the ground, creating various branches, only one, the main branch, strikes the earth. Similarly, in the creative process, amidst the many potential ideas, one emerges as the most prominent, the one that will be fully developed and realized.
Creative Culmination
The moment of impact, when lightning strikes the ground, is tangible—light, sound, and energy. Similarly, when an idea is realized—in writing, art, or problem-solving—its impact is visual, auditory, and physical. It’s the moment of creation where the idea, like lightning, illuminates and inspires.
Igniting Creativity
Gathering Notes and Air Particle Charging: Just as air particles charge electrically, forming the potential for a lightning strike, our process of gathering notes and information charges our creative atmosphere. Each note, like a charged particle, holds the potential to spark something greater, contributing to the buildup of creative energy.
Comparing, Connecting, and Forming Currents: The act of comparing and connecting notes mirrors the formation of electrical currents in a storm cloud. Just as currents seek a path to release their energy, our interconnected ideas seek a path for expression. This stage is crucial, as it shapes the direction and intensity of the forthcoming creative strike.
Writing, Striking, and Thunderous Impact: The process of writing a manuscript is akin to the lightning bolt striking down. It’s a moment of powerful release, where the accumulated energy of our thoughts and ideas finds a path to the ground. The refinement and publishing of our work then resonate like thunder, a manifestation of our creativity’s impact on the world around us.
Through this journey, we not only map the unknown archipelagos of our minds but also learn to appreciate the beauty and power of the creative storms we summon and navigate. Each voyage, with its gathering of pearls and its eventual thunderous climax, teaches us more about the depths of our creativity and the potential of our ideas to illuminate and inspire.
In the journey of content creation, two distinct yet complementary approaches guide the writer: the Top-Down method, characterized by structured planning and purpose-driven writing, and the Bottom-Up approach, rooted in spontaneous ideation and organic note-taking. This article explores how these methodologies intertwine to create a cohesive and effective writing process.
Embarking on the writer’s odyssey resembles a sailor navigating an endless sea, dotted with islands of thought and archipelagos of ideas. Each island is a destination, a topic to be explored and understood. Why am I writing this, the sailor asks, gazing at the horizon. The answer sets the course, guiding the ship through the waters of creativity and intellect.
The Top-Down Approach: The Cartographer’s Approach to Writing
In this approach, one begins as a cartographer, mapping the journey ahead. A list of topics emerges, each a coordinate on the chart, promising a story to be told. Drafts form like sketches of unexplored lands, each a step closer to the final map. The editorial calendar serves as the ship’s log, marking time and tide, ensuring that no island of thought is left uncharted in this systematic exploration.
The North Star: Writing with Purpose
Every journey begins with a purpose. In the Top-Down approach, understanding ‘Why’ lays the foundation. Determining the purpose is akin to setting a course for a voyage, providing direction and meaning to the content created.
Potential Destinations: Curating a List of Topics
Like charting notable areas on the map, compiling a list of topics forms the backbone of the editorial journey. This list acts as a guide, ensuring that each piece of content aligns with the overall vision and goals.
Archipelago of Ideas: Navigating Through Drafts
Each draft represents a stop along the journey, a place to refine and reassess. These drafts, born from initial ideas, evolve through revisits and revisions, maturing into well-crafted pieces.
Orienting in Time: Scheduling
Implementing an editorial calendar is like using a compass. It provides structure and timing, ensuring regular and consistent content delivery, essential for navigating the vast seas of content creation.
The Bottom-Up Approach: Discovering as We Sail
Contrasting the intention is the bottom-up approach, where the writer is an explorer, charting courses on the go. Writing-while-reading is akin to collecting tales from foreign shores, each a piece of the puzzle. Note-taking becomes a spontaneous sketching of landscapes, raw and untamed. Ideation is the journey through fog and storm, finding paths where none seemed to exist. Free-flow writing is the sailor riding the wild waves, letting the sea guide the pen.
Writing-While-Reading: casting a net while sailing
As you read, you capture ideas, perspectives, and insights, enriching your understanding and providing a wealth of material to draw upon in your writing. Engaging with other texts while writing is a fertile ground for ideas. It’s a dynamic process where reading sparks new thoughts, leading to immediate, responsive writing. This method enriches the content with diverse perspectives and insights.
Note-Taking: Collecting Pearls
By deep diving you discover raw gems and pearls in the quotes, snippets and fragments. These notes, though brief and seemingly insignificant, can hold treasures of ideas, waiting to be explored and expanded upon.
Ideation: The Wind in Our Sails
Ideation is the gust of wind that propels the ship forward. It’s a spontaneous, dynamic process where thoughts and creativity merge, leading to new and exciting writing directions.
Free Flow-Writing: Riding the Waves
Free flow-writing is about riding the waves of creativity. It’s an uninhibited, unrestricted form of writing, allowing thoughts and ideas to flow naturally, capturing the essence of spontaneity and raw insight.
Merging Horizons: From Fleeting Thoughts to Permanent Records
In this literary odyssey, the distinction between a rough note and an elaborate manuscript becomes as blurred as the line between sea and sky. What starts as a fleeting thought on a distant shore evolves, through revisits and refinements, into a tale as vast and deep as the ocean.
In this voyage of words and ideas, each approach – whether the methodical mapping of the top-down or the adventurous exploration of the bottom-up – offers its unique treasures. The writer, like the sailor, learns to navigate these methods, understanding that the journey itself is as important as the destination. With each article, each newsletter, we chart new courses, exploring uncharted waters of creativity and intellect, leaving behind a trail of narratives in our wake.
Impressions so far
I realize I don’t have a draft repository per se. I have hundreds of disorganized sketches and fragments. My next step will be to cultivate a library of ideas to be developed in parallel so I don’t have to improvise each week.
Writing using metaphors is fun. Sometimes I feel lost and I don’t remember why I chose sails or pearls but the vivid images evoked by those words are making this task less dry.
ChatGPT is changing my attitude towards writing. I can experiment much more, revise, and fine-tune many more times. Problem: it’s never-ending, it’s only the due date to make me work.
This weekly writing challenge is harder than I thought and more painful than usual: good.
In our quest for knowledge, we each steer our ship through a vast sea of information. Our Personal Knowledge Base (PKB)- a repository where we store the treasure of our knowledge- acts as both the map and the compass, guiding us through this journey. But as any seasoned navigator knows, a map is only useful if it’s well-organized and up-to-date because a treasure is only valuable if it can be found when needed.
Navigating the Waters of Information
Organizing our PKB isn’t just about neatness; it’s akin to preparing for a long voyage. Without proper order, we might as well be adrift in a sea of chaos, where valuable insights are as elusive as sunken treasure. Organizing isn’t just about tidiness; it’s about future-proofing my knowledge. I’ve often found myself adrift in a sea of untagged, uncategorized notes, realizing that without proper care, they’re as good as lost.
Embarking on the Voyage of Organization
My PKB, currently a collection of articles scattered across blogs, notes, and social media, is like a series of uncharted islands. The task at hand is akin to charting these islands, cataloging them as if they were newly discovered lands. To avoid the fate of my 20 years of lost paper notes or my underused digital archives, I’ve embraced a more strategic approach:
The Capture Phase: This phase involves diligently listing every piece of content, treating each as a newfound source. It’s like casting a wide net to gather every fish in the sea, ensuring none slip away.
One Inbox to Rule Them All: All new information first lands in a singular inbox. From here, I periodically sort, categorize, and integrate these pieces into my PKB. This system prevents the pile-up of unprocessed knowledge.
Integration: Each article is meticulously added to the PKB. This process is like carefully placing each captured fish into a well-organized aquarium, where they can be easily found and admired. When I capture new information, I don’t just store it; I give it a home. Each piece of data is immediately categorized, making future retrieval a breeze.
Regular Reviews: I revisit my PKB, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks and that everything remains relevant and accessible.
Drafting New Voyages: From this organized wealth of knowledge, I set sail to create new drafts, charting courses for future articles and newsletters.
The Paradox of Streamlining
In this quest for efficiency, I often find myself charting more courses than initially planned. It’s like setting out to discover a new island, only to find a whole new archipelago. I sometimes feel like I’m rowing harder, not smarter. While it might seem like more work at the outset, this thorough approach promises smoother voyages ahead.
Is There a Harbor in Sight?
Can we ever truly drop anchor and rest in the comfort of a fully organized PKB? Can we just drop the anchor and forget about the endless organization? Perhaps the journey never truly ends, but it evolves, becoming more about sailing skillfully and purposefully through our sea of knowledge.
Join me as we continue this voyage of discovery and organization. Together, let’s not just navigate these waters but learn to do so with grace and efficiency.
Interactions
Ramses Oudt challenged himself to post 52 email courses during 2024. Interesting. He found my question useful, at the end of the first week: “And you, what have you learned?” He loved it so much that he embedded the question as a review practice at the end of each week. Nice!
A habitual creativity challenge to refine the process of observing, understanding, learning, and applying knowledge.
My PKM
My Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) approach is a structured process for organizing and reflecting upon acquired knowledge.
I manage my knowledge in four phases:
Capture: the starting point of PKM, where I gather information, ideas, and observations. Every piece of knowledge, big or small, is collected for later analysis.
Integration: I combine new information with what already exists in my archive. This process allows me to review and update my previous knowledge in light of discoveries.
Connection: I strive to find links between seemingly unrelated ideas. It’s an exercise that stimulates critical and creative thinking, often leading to new perspectives.
Sharing: where reflections and connections take a shareable form. Whether it’s a detailed note or a brief article, I aim to make my findings accessible and useful.
Reflection: I iterate on the process trying to update it in the light of discoveries and improvements.
Through iterating my PKM method, I build a deeper and more articulated understanding of the world around me.
PKM-to-PKM
I am a Master Capturer(TM) but I frequently risk falling into the Collector’s Fallacy black hole. I tend to capture without checking the reason why something is resonating with me. So I end up with an immense quantity of bits and pieces that prevent me from moving beyond the initial capturing phase. What if I do less capturing and more connecting?
How can I apply this method to what I already know and have written about myself? I want to collect questions, prompts, and curiosity to make my PKM work for me.
A Habitual Creativity Challenge?
What if I applied what I learned with CREAZEE and challenged myself to write every week about my PKM process?
I am terrified at the idea of committing myself publicly to publish a newsletter every week.
I met Quinten in Ness Labs, a community of creatives. I proposed a book club on “The Uncertainty Mindset” and we started to zoom-meet every week.
It was about three years ago and we never stopped since.
Quinten is a Joyful Creative Enzyme. We never had to plan our conversations. The sole fact of being online connected sparked in us the urge to talk.
About what?
Watch the video to have a sample. Consider it an excellent representation of what Q & Max do every week for one hour.
Among the topic we touched on was content curation, visualizing conversations in real-time (as in this case), collaboration, Personal Knowledge Management, and note-taking, the role of AI in learning.
We also discussed my experience with the CREAZEE Daily Writing Habit Challenge which involved about 15 people in 2021. We wrote about 500 articles in a month, one article per day, every single day.
It’s a long video, consider it an invitation to be part of a meeting between friends with an unstoppable desire to share their enthusiasm for knowledge and for life.
Having a writing deadline doesn’t mean we should invent something at the last moment.We are forced to do that if we never save our ideas. If we have a system to capture ideas when and where they come to our attention we prepare the building blocks for our next piece.
There are different ways to leverage existing content once we can retrieve it. They can be divided into two categories following the bottom-up and top-down approach:
Curate your idea garden
Review your note archive, research bank, Zettelkasten, second brain, or your scratch file. Look for already connected ideas or the ones most resonating with you. Reviewing your notes closes the loop between capturing information and creating new content. If we never review what we captured we risk falling into the black hole of information hoarding.
An interesting perspective is offered by tools for thought augmenting our capacity to retrieve relevant information with minor efforts. The future will reward us with an interesting development in that field.
If reviewing your existent content increases your confusion by leaving you disoriented, you should first review your note-taking workflow. What was that interesting in the first place? Why did you capture it? Failing to explain to yourself the motivation behind a note indicates a problem in your way of learning.
In addition to the emergent interests resonating through your motivated capturing of information, you might decide what you want to write about because you have a strong determination or an immediate need. Sometimes that helps because it relieves us from the decision-making burden. It’s too easy to understand the why behind a work if it has been requested by the boss, colleagues, clients, or somebody influencing us.
The wisest approach to our cultural enlightenment is to plan our journey. On an exploratory path to what interests and matters to us, we should decide the field, the topic, and the focus of what we need to write about, next.
How to review your notes
If we have been so organized to have all of our notes in one place we have some possible approaches to review them:
Randomly
Use the chance to pick a note, any note. Learn from “The Dice Man” how randomness could drive our life. In this case, there are no particular criteria to specify, just don’t be picky, the game wants you to work on the first thing pulled from the pile.
Recency
Pick the latest note you wrote, the most recent topic which interested you. It’s fresh in your mind. You should be able to remember how you were feeling when you captured it. No need for Proust’s madeleine to relive something close in time.
Popularity
If you have a blog or a newsletter: what’s the most popular article? Or what’s the most popular tag or category?
If you have a lively exchange with the public: what’s the most frequently asked question you receive?
If you are an educator or a communicator: what’s the topmost topic you’re asked to discuss?
If you have a nice PKM system, what’s the most connected note?
Completion
If you keep your drafts organized: what’s the most refined? Which incomplete article would require the most minor work to be a shining final piece to share or publish?
In my case, this draft was waiting to be refined on top of the others. Now you know why it became my next post to be shared..
You should always leave your note better than how you found it. A powerful simple rule that leverages the repetition of bettering actions to slowly but constantly increase the quality of your note archive.
Select the notes you found the most interesting during your review.
Filter them by accuracy, relevancy, and richness.
Search for any further source that can integrate potential gaps in your selection. If needed, consider doing additional research.
Extract the parts you want to use. Brutally copy and paste them into new notes (to feed your note archive) and into a draft document to prepare your final copy.
Don’t be too picky with your internal sources, plan a free-flowing writing session to reconstruct your memory of anything that is missing or unclear.
Ensure zero tolerance for plagiarism by citing all sources and paraphrasing and rewriting the key ideas you want to use by carefully recognizing the original authors.
Identify the parts, their relationships, and the boundaries building the system you are focusing on. Having a clear map of what composes our focus clarifies how to talk about the whole and its components.
examples:
A Note-Taking system is a thinking tool. The notes are our thoughts, not just their representation. The way we connect concepts is the manifestation of our thinking.
There is no strict definition of the atomic unit of a note-taking system but just the concept of a “note”.
A note is a container that can have a loose or a strict structure
There can be as many types of notes as the one that we need.
Usually, notes differ based on their temporary nature: fleeting or permanent and their source: literature or thoughts.
“R” as Relationships
How are parts connected? What relationships exist between them? How are they providing a richer understanding of the whole?
Examples:
The value of a note-taking system is its interconnectedness. The more I create relationships between notes based on connecting criteria the more I can articulate my thoughts following non-linear paths between my notes.
What’s your take on what you are writing about? Is it part of your experience, your dreams, or your designs? Do you have recommendations, warnings, or suggestions? What have you learned by writing this article? Can you put yourself into the shoes of different people, professional roles, and personas? How can you enrich your views with insights and opinions from different angles?
And, finally, write!
All of the above should provide us with lots of inspiration and material at a more or less refined level. We should now be able to move from the review and research phase into the revision and rewriting.
We cannot condone the attitude of stitching all the pieces together thinking it will be ready to be published. We need to wear the Editor Hat. We might maybe put temporal and physical distance from this draft. Let’s come back to it after at least 24 hours, the more the better.
How do we judge our draft with the eyes of a stranger? Is it readable, and flowing? Is it interesting? Does it robustly support the point we want to make?
But that’s another story, deserving another article.
Do you plan or improvise your creativity?
Do you review your notes? Do you curate your drafts?
What’s your experience in phasing writing due dates without improvising? I am curious if you are so brave to maintain your note archive in a way conducive to your creativity when you need it the most. Is your note-archive feeding your exhausted brain when you don’t know what to write about? How do you cope with the sense of boring tiredness in rereading things you wrote and that maybe you wanted to forget forever? (yeah, in my case, frequently!)
Hoarding information is different from building up knowledge. When we fall prey to information overload, we suffer from the failure of our attention filter.
When something captures our attention, we should ask why.
Why is it interesting to us?
When we buy a book, we should also find the time needed to read it. We are betting on our reputation. What is the value it can add to our life? Will we read it? Will we learn from it? Will we make the best use of the information it contains? Will we integrate new vital concepts into our knowledge wealth?
Failing to clarify our motivations leads to the accumulation of dead weight. The search for information is impeding our growth like encrusted salt on flamingos’ legs making their flight deadly impossible. It’s a black hole entrapping our attention at the horizon of rationality, imprisoning our free will, dissolving our time.
We want to search for knowledge, instead. Finding the best information when we need it, where we need it, to achieve the goals that will make us advance in life. It’s a springboard to our elevation—a propulsor for our levitation.
You can fight information overload by stopping and reflecting. The next time you find a brand new shiny thing, ask yourself: “why is that interesting to me”?
An effective answer contains three elements:
Explain the reasons why you find it relevant.
It’s a breakthrough concept in my professional field. I want to be up-to-date.
I like the story, it stimulates my imagination.
It’s an important topic for everybody, and I know nothing about it.
Commit to extracting the best knowledge out of it.
I’ll book a Pomodoro of study on my calendar every day for the next two weeks.
I’ll listen to the audiobook during my daily walk. I’ll take voice notes that I will transcribe.
I’ll draw a visual map of the key concepts.
Make yourself accountable to give the highest value to the time and resources you’ll dedicate to your commitment.
I’ll commit with a trusted friend to write a review within a month.
I’ll write a blog post describing it and promise I will write a review about it.
I’ll read it together with a group of people in a weekly book club.
I’ve failed, gloriously, for years. And I keep on falling several times per day. But I am not lost, when I suddenly wake up from the torpor of the infinite black hole, and I ask “why is this interesting to me”?
When I will conclude my year of blogging I will dedicate this stolen time to more reading. I’ve learned that If I don’t actively take notes while reading I will retain a few commas. So I will write while reading. I might be able to publish much less daily but I should be able to capture more notes.
And, yes, then I will connect the captured note into a draft.
It’s in moments like these, when I don’t want to write that I must find value in my notes. I don’t want to choose what I should write because I chose already when I annotated something. If I was diligent I’d also organize my notes according to emergent topics. What’s the most popular theme in my notes? What grabbed my attention yesterday or yesteryear? That is the approach. The next obstacle is in having a note archive organized to offer such creative opportunities. Do I have idea buckets? Draft idea lists? Semi-finished articles written when I did have the inspiration? Because, otherwise, my note archive has no creative value. It would be only an amass of junk hoarded with the illusion of making something out of it, one day. And that day will never come.
So, exercise, before starting to write, if it is not a free-flowing writing session, I shall curate my notes by identifying threads, discussions, connections and potential drafts. Or, better, the work done in the note archive should be exactly that: the writing. The final manuscript should naturally evolve in the notes and when it will spontaneously emerge I would only need to extract it into a draft, candidate for publishing.
My next step is to move my writing context from the blank page of a new document to the already existing network of notes and ideas. So that writing becomes gardening, curating, connecting, nurturing ideas that have been already found.
It all sounds good. Let’s see what practicing it will look like.
354/365.
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