I understood I need to create solid external motivators for me to pursue personal goals beyond professional ones. I must admit I went from unemployed to working, from no websites to a personal blog, from nothing written online to about a couple of hundreds of articles on the Web. I wanted to build a community to support my motivation, and after months of doubts and false starts, I also created it.

Now, I have different threads going on with additional pushes and other needs. Finding the right balance is difficult. It requires making an inventory. I should review all parts of this little ecosystem I created and check my goals.

The Personal Website

Curatella.com is online. I publish daily or almost daily an article. There are about 200 of them. The following is low and quiet. I am dealing with diverse topics. There is no strong continuity. I tend to write a personal diary rather than offering content with a specific value for a defined audience.

It’s the source of all ideas and experiments. It all starts here, and the other experiments are usually spin-offs of this central laboratory.

The Daily Writing Habit

CREAZEE.COM was born as an idea to challenge other people to build a daily writing habit. It has a more defined scope: it’s about building creative habits. It’s pretty comforting to have such a clear mission for a project. It helps me better to understand what I should put in it.

The Creative Community

The CREAZEE Community was the natural container for the participant of the writing challenge. We are now at the 60 days of life. I’ve learned a lot, and I discovered a lot about imagining an online service, setting up the infrastructure, promoting, hosting, and moderating a small group of creative people. It was fun, inspiring, tiring, sometimes frustrating but one of the best learning experiences I have ever had. That is the real learning-by-doing I was looking for.

The Future?

What’s next? How do I want to leverage what I have learned so far? How shall I evolve it?

It all comes down to why I am doing it and what I want to get out of it. It’s painful to get in an unstable situation where I have to motivate others to get the motivation to create.

Either this feedback loop is not convenient to me in terms of creativity, or it is working great but not in the right direction. I love sharing my creative process with others, and I feel blessed to collaborate in ideating and developing ideas. I don’t want to create additional fragmentation, though. I don’t want to be the only one responsible for leading and motivating a group to create because I need to be part of that group and receive the same motivation.

It’s like having an engine started and getting in motion while lacking a clear direction to follow. We’re moving, where are we going?

That’s another bi-faced aspect: adapting while moving. It’s motivating and, at the same time, limiting. I have so little time to dedicate to reflect and create that I cannot plan long term. So I can perform only those maneuvers allowed by those 15-30 minutes per day, stolen from life.

Those are the two key issues:

1. What’s my goal?
2. Do I have enough resources to pursue it?

What’s my goal?

I want to think better, work better, live better. I know I can do that by learning better. I have a strong intuition towards learning by doing. Reading, understanding, communicating, and writing are the pillars at the base of a learning workflow enabling me to pursue my goals. I can motivate myself to build and refine my workflow only if I commit publicly to do it.

So, I can only learn in public.

So, whatever I do should be part of a shared, collaborative project to put myself into it.

Learning about what?

I am working on it

So what?

I need to involve a community of creative people by sharing what I’ve learned and learning from them and with them. But I cannot get too involved in different topics and threads than the ones I want to focus on. I need to find an abstract level to collaborate. A way to share questions, approaches, methods, tools, and techniques that apply to any topic. So, while everybody creates and learns, I can contribute to the progress towards achieving my goal.

And now what?

So the problems of habitual creativity and knowledge management are good and valuable. The service I want to provide should be about “how to be creative every day” and “how to manage your personal knowledge.” And that’s it.

The Daily Writing Habit Challenge should focus on the approaches and the techniques to “write every day.” There should be less overlapping with the topic choice and each individual’s direction.

This doesn’t prevent us from finding commonalities and ways to collaborate on the same topics, though.

The Personal Knowledge Management System is my joy and pain. I’ve been struggling to build one for decades. There are no magic formulas, no perfect tools, no ideal workflows. I need to work and produce knowledge that allows me to pursue my goals: there are no other criteria. That’s my learning journey, my path of discovery, and there is a lot I can share with a community.

What do you think?

Thanks for your patience. I am aware I keep on raising questions and bringing uncertainty. This is the place where I can share this kind of thought. So if you reached this point, I am thankful for your attention. Do you have any suggestions about finding a better solution to motivate my learning while sharing it with others?

Thank you.