CREAZEE

Author: Massimo Curatella

  • The 12 Favorite Problems Method

    The 12 Favorite Problems Method

    Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”

    Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts

    Other articles about “12 Favorite Problems”

    My 12 Favorite Problems
    My 12 Favorite Problems
    My 12 Favorite Problems, Version 2
    Identity and Relationships (My 12 Favorite Problems)
    Learning and Health (My 12 Favorite Problems)
    Thinking and Communication (My 12 Favorite Problems)
    Ecosystem Health and Design (My 12 Favorite Problems)
    Technology and Creativity (My 12 Favorite Problems)
    Art and Problem Solving (My 12 Favorite Problems)
    Merging and Revising my Favorite Problems into a Draft
    Coherence between Ideas and Problems
    Refining the Intersection between Ideas and Problems
  • From Zero to CREAZEE

    From Zero to CREAZEE

    I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 29 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 165th daily article in a row. 

    CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge April 2021, a Retrospective

    We are about at the end of the CREAZEE daily writing challenge. And it’s time to reflect: how did it go?

    It was a success in many aspects. I would have never thought I would have created a service to launch on the Internet and get subscribers. So having 15 people writing for one month in this crazy creative challenge is an incredible achievement of mine.

    What worked very well was establishing a single clear purpose for this challenge. That was, “write every day.” It allowed me to be focused on the actions to take, the suggestions to make, and the behaviors to maintain as the Challenge facilitator. I’ve supported the group with optional daily prompts. Although most of the challengers followed them, some participants brilliantly achieved writing every day without following my prompts. And I’m grateful for that. Because the idea is not to write what I’m suggesting, but for you to write whatever you want to. If you wanted to have suggestions or stimuli or prompts, well, I provided them.

    What excited me was the participants. I was expecting people from entirely different backgrounds. Young people from the West coast of the US, all of them looking for a new start-up to become a billionaire? That was my experience when I did myself a challenge to write for 30 days. I am in a period in which I am very reflective, and sometimes I become philosophical. So the idea to exploit and find the following multi-billion product to sell was not exciting to me. It didn’t happen because I’ve hosted a different public. I created resonance in other minds. And that is quite logical now with hindsight, but it wasn’t not expecting that.

    I’m so glad that deep people and bright minds joined me in this writing collective. They surprised me on more than one occasion because they wrote about their lives, something personal. And most of them published it on blogs. That surprised me. They shared things from their own lives, their own experiences, their families, their pains, their losses. I was astonished. Sometimes I didn’t know what to say. I’m not expected to say anything about the content, but something interesting happened –This is the other aspect– there was some bonding between the challengers.

    We created a small community of very dedicated and motivated people. And there was quite a friendly interaction between them in reading, commenting, giving suggestions to each other’s articles. And all of that was unexpected, unplanned. It might appear as obvious, now but I wasn’t looking for that.

    I was wise to aim at one simple thing, writing every day, without setting any boundary, any limitation, by suggesting prompts and sparks fuel their fire.

    In terms of results, it’s astounding. We’ve been writing for 29 days, today, every day. So it’s about 400 articles. It’s an enormous amount of work. So I was planning to read and host approximately 400 pieces, but I was not expecting the number of messages exchanged during the interactions. We exchanged more than 1’500 messages. Yes, most of them are mine, sure, but there were beautiful exchanges and conversations.

    Only at the end of the journey, I decided to have some live calls. It was nice to meet people in real online life. It is something so new to me because, this time, I was not an attendee invited by somebody. I was the organizer. So it felt weird. Participants were lovely and available and open to comments and sharing their enthusiasm. It was a unique experience.

    It will take time to digest it and reflect upon the whole experience. There’s a lot of learning for me that I need to elaborate on.

    I gathered many suggestions for improvement about how to remind every day to participants that they have to write and create accountability groups or partners. 

    The collaboration platform, Circle, is working quite well, but I’m not sure that the notification system was the best way to remind people to write. It’s something that needs to be fine-tuned. Maybe a dedicated newsletter with daily prompts would have served better. We’ll see.

    The article tracking was a nightmare. I did it by hand, one by one every day, on a spreadsheet. It was a lot of work. I want to change that. I am the facilitator, but I’m not a judge. I can only push you to write. It is not my job to check your article, see that it is in the right place, and put a checkbox or not if you did it. Multiply that by 15: it is hours of work accumulating daily that made me devote more time to management than the leadership—this a capital sin in facilitating a group. I need to either delegate or distribute this responsibility.

    The writing prompts were ready before the Challenge began. But I did not use them. I got inspiration from my 200 articles and also on that preparation, but I’ve crafted prompts with clear instructions every day. It was an essential part of the success because I used the “what, how, and why” approach. Not very long instructions but clearly defined. So participants knew what they have to do and where to execute their daily tasks. And that worked.

    It was crucial to have all contributions in a shared public folder. Everybody could read anybody else’s articles with complete transparency. The nice thing about the Google Doc is that I can see you while you are writing. I frequently went into the personal folder of challengers to check their docs and look while writing. Sometimes we had little chats, and jokes, and or even suggestions. You can suggest edits and can save revisions. It’s a powerful tool to have for this kind of personal writing, but also group collaboration. It was a great decision.

    I didn’t force anybody to publish. That makes CREAZEE different from others. This is not “shipping.” This is “writing.” That approach created ambiguity about the prompt of writing because what do you mean by “writing”? That was one straightforward and simple question I received. Is it an article? Is it a journal entry? Do I  follow your prompt and write every day saying different things, or am I refining what I started to write as a draft? I wanted it to be like that. My writing experience, one year of private journaling, and then one year of blog publishing 200 articles, is that the most important thing you have to do is build a habit to write.

    In the beginning, it is pretty irrelevant what you are writing and how and for whom. You just have to write. So when I say writing every day, I mean creating that dedicated and focused space in which you look into your thoughts, you listen to them, and you try to capture them. It is not necessarily researching for an essay or explaining something. It is more listening to your inner voice. Sometimes it can be a personal reflective piece. Some others, it’s the blessing of having found the focus and the proper setting in which you can write about your ideas. It’s also finding ideas, collecting ideas.

    It’s not easy for me to summarize the entire experience of CREAZEE because I have so many inspirations that it will take me years to express and develop them.

    It’s a fantastic start. I am exhausted, but I’m thrilled and proud of the CREAZEE daily writing habit challenge, first edition in April 2021.

    Join us in the next:
    https://creazee.com/challenge/

  • Discover your Audience by Talking to People

    Discover your Audience by Talking to People

    Who’s your audience? If you are publishing your articles online, you are talking to somebody. Yes, you might have the goal of sharing what you write to explore, be accountable, and remember. If you are sharing your thoughts to attract interests or find like-minded people, you need to ask yourself this question: who’s your audience?

    You don’t need to be definitive. You can start with desires and assumptions about who you want to talk to and what kind of readers you would like to find. But how do you refine your target? How do you know if you captured the right traits of your ideal public? And, most of all, are you sure those people are sharing the qualities you imagine?

    Talk to them. Get out of your building, physical or digital, and reach to them. You will discover so many different worlds. You will find that “user personas” are just rough approximations of infinitely more complex scenarios. You will also learn that you might be attractive to other people you were not expecting to be. Or that you might have other occasions to provide value to them you would not think about.

    Online comments and emails are not the best media to research your audience. Only a tiny part of people interact directly with authors and online publishers. You should reach out to them in any way possible.

    Set up meetings in real life or online. Webinars, meet-ups, zoom calls, group events, workshops, and any other collective or individual way to talk to real human beings are the most valuable way to learn about your audience.

    By talking to people, you practice being yourself, being the author or creator you are, and you will have chances to stand behind your creative choices. Let your mission be made of assumptions to be validated by talking to your audience.

    Talk to people to improve the chance of building successful products and services. Talk to people to know better what interests them and how you could provide the best value to them. Talk to people to avoid building in the void and shooting in the dark.

    I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 28 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 165th daily article in a row.

  • Saving and Resuming a Thinking Session

    Saving and Resuming a Thinking Session

    Finding continuity in a fragmented world is challenging. Deep work can help when you can focus undistracted on a single task, and you concentrate your attention on doing the right things in the right way. But it’s a luxury. Distractions and commitments are waiting behind every corner.

    What if we could find continuity in fragmentation? Imagine saving your thinking session like you would suspend your computer. All applications remain open, all files are saved, and you can resume your working session just by waking up your PC by pressing a key.

    What’s the analogy with a thinking session? If we grow a habit of using the last minute of a thinking session to summarize the critical thoughts and the open questions, it would be easier to resume thinking where we left it.

    It’s a matter of discipline and habits, once again, in my journey. It’s too easy to rush closing work and to jump to the next task. We need to force us to reserve some time to close our thinking applications and saving the open thoughts. That’s the first area where we could improve in our Mental OS (TM).

    A valuable thing to try in my next working and thinking session will be to apply this session-saving approach. This article, for instance, it’s a snapshot of a recurring idea I keep on thinking about, and I’ve never had the chance to set in writing. Will it be an effective saved thinking session to resume my train of thought. Let’s discover it in one of the following articles.

    I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 23 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 160th daily article in a row. 

  • Create to Feel Alive

    Create to Feel Alive

    Why am I looking for methods and tools to solve problems and to be creative?

    I do it because I’d like to make my life easier and more fun. I tend to get bored and to be distracted. So curiosity is a form of escape for me. And I find amusing those games, tricks, and methods that help you to discover the world.

    So when I do my work as a designer or as a teacher, or as a coach, it’s because I want it for myself. It’s a way to commit to delivering and sharing my ideas, tricks, discoveries, and explorations with others. It works as a motivation for me to be creative.

    Somebody said that the best way to learn is to teach. That’s why I want to teach because I want to learn.

    We can also say that the best way to learn is to design, to make that’s why I want to design. I like finding solutions to things, especially when they lead to novel and useful solutions. That is the definition of creativity.

    I don’t like to be alone too much. It’s also a way to attract the interest of creative people, or people who want to play with me and want to create worlds, create stories, and create businesses, projects, and something that makes me feel alive.

    I understood that only by exposing myself, for instance, on the internet, would I expand my reach and my chance to know other people. And so far, the journey has been fantastic. I’ve met hundreds of people. Some of them became friends. Some of them became clients, some of them became providers, colleagues, business partners. And in some of the communities I created, some people who met there became a family.

    So being creative and sharing your creativity means not only thinking and trying to be fun and original, but it also means making. You have to make something to share.

    Suppose you create environments, fostering and promoting collaboration. In that case, you develop communities where you can multiply the effect of being creative while having fun and dealing with the world’s wicked problems. And if you do it well, it can also become your profession. You can earn a living by doing that.

    This is why I write, I facilitate, I design, and I build things: to feel more alive.

    I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 22 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 159th daily article in a row.

  • Write About your Fears, to Be Stronger

    Write About your Fears, to Be Stronger

    How do you live with fear? Find the reasons why you have anxious feelings. Usually, fear comes from the unknown. Or from past painful experiences.

    I don’t know what is there in the dark as a child. It could be anything. Fear preserves me, keeps me alive because there might be a hole. There might be somebody who wants to hurt me. So fear makes me stay still. There’s a biological reason for that. If there’s a predator, if I’m not moving, I am increasing the chance of not being noted. When I am scared, I tend to close to myself, I become smaller, so I am less noticeable.

    Fear is an important feeling. It keeps you alive. What if you embrace it?

    What if you use it as a prompt, to react, not to self-destroy?

    Why are you scared? What is scaring you? Asking those questions can be a painful process. You can do it on your own. Or ask a friend. Sometimes you need a professional to help you.

    It’s the first step to be more self-aware. The more you know about the context in which you experience fear, the more you can either accept it or find ways to react and change.

    So, how do you live with fear? The first answer that comes to my mind is: be brave and face your fear by embracing it. You don’t have to risk your safety. You have to be an explorer. What happens if you research your anxiety? If you do experiment around fears? What does it change?

    Think about becoming a scientist of yourself. Hypothesize an experiment, prepare it, execute it and reflect on what happened. By changing your behaviors, the settings in which you’re living, working, and breathing, are there any different reactions in your feelings? If you feel worse, stop and avoid doing that again. Understanding why. If you feel better, try to understand why you feel like that.

    How do you live with fear?

    Be brave and investigate the causes of your fear and call them by name.

    Then, react. Become more self-aware and take charge of your life.

    Writing is a powerful technique to reflect on your feelings. Think about journaling and keeping a diary of thoughts. When you write, you track your feelings’ evolution, fear included. Like a researcher, an investigator, you can write the history of your feelings. 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.

    Write, and fight your fears.

    This article is dedicated to Siddu Tummala who suggested the writing prompt to write it.

    I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 15 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 152nd daily article in a row.

  • Do you want to lead better? Write

    Do you want to lead better? Write

    Clarity is a crucial aspect of leadership. If we don’t know what we want, we cannot lead anybody else in doing it. Lack of clarity could bring superficial behaviors, taking things for granted, and ineffective communication.

    When we don’t have a clear understanding of the final objective, we struggle to identify the next step. A lack of planning falls on our team, as well, and hits even harder. If we don’t have an open relationship with our peers, we risk having nobody telling us we are wrong. Mistakes accumulate. Things get worse. Frustration and resentment come into play.

    Even if we are under stress and have limited time to make decisions, we should always dedicate focused time to understanding our goals. Having our destination clear, we can identify the steps and the resources needed to reach it.

    When we have such clarity, we can involve other people in the execution.

    One of the best ways to create clarity is to write. If we write down the problem we want to solve, we can share it and collaborate on it. It will be easier to ask for opinions and advice on how to better plan. It will become evident if there are gaps in the information gathered and if our understanding of the context is correct.

    Writing is thinking, and putting into written words the goals we are facing is an effective way to create clarity.

    Avoid leading your team to confusion, frustration, and embarrassment: write down your understanding of the problem and illustrate a vision, a strategy, and a plan to solve it. If you co-create this clarity with your team, you will naturally improve the ownership and the involvement of other people.

    Do you want to lead better? Write.

  • Dream Big, Build It Small, but Daily

    Dream Big, Build It Small, but Daily

    Pursuing long-term goals is something we can do only by setting coherent short-term goals.

    We can grow an ambition to achieve a big goal in our life. If we look at that North Star shining in the foggy sky of our dream, we risk keeping it where it is, a dream. That future context, when we will be successful at what we want to achieve, needs to be discounted to the present. And capitalized. It’s only by investing a small sum, a little effort, every day, in a consistent way, that we can see that North Star approaching our reality.

    Walking 1’000 Km in a year

    In 2017 I had any possible pain: neck, shoulders, back, legs, feet. If we went for a short walk, I would cry. Tears would slide down my cheeks, and I would not be for the joy of meeting you.

    By crying, I started to put my body together. I would walk every day. Why? Because I couldn’t go on like that.

    Long story short. Every year I’ve waked 1’000 km. My life changed. I have no pains. I sleep better. I feel better.

    Writing 500’000 words in a year

    Starting to walk when that action procures tears to you means you need long walks to get accustomed to it. Those were the moments when I began to listen to audiobooks and podcasts and record my thoughts. Thanks to audio transcribing tools, I started to collect a lot of journal entries. I got the habit of walking, talking and transcribing, daily. This opened my interminable flow of thoughts, ideas, desires.

    When I put together 356 days of writing, I got half a million words on paper. I was amazed. How was it possible to write so much. After all of those years without collecting a word.

    Then I started a blog. Then a challenge to write and publish an article per day.

    This is my 149th daily article published in a row.

    Creating an online community of Creative People

    How could I reuse all of those words? I’ve learned so much on my skin about creativity, habit-forming, tools and techniques to ideate, connecting concepts, publishing.

    That is why I created CREAZEE. In April 2021, 15 Challengers are making a habit of creating every day. We’re only at Day 13, and we have already produced thousands of words.

    And that is not my job. I did all of the previous as a side-hustle while carrying one extended family through a Pandemic.

    Do it small but do it every day

    We need a system to follow daily, to create small contributions bringing us to more complex successes. We can achieve significant objectives only by creating a habit. That is the system that we need because we can win big only if we win small, every day. 

    Start now by doing a little thing, and keep on doing it, every day. You’ll reach the stars without even realizing it.

    I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 13 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 150th daily article in a row.

  • Plan Your Creativity

    Plan Your Creativity

    Planning is an activity bringing the future to the present. When you define your intentions and make them manifest, you act in two ways. You do something now because it is appropriate. And you decide you will have to do something in the future to follow up. Unless you want to drive by sight, you need to plan your future actions.

    You plan when external forces require you to commit to a future action: going to the doctor, delivering a project, meeting a person, celebrating a birthday, paying bills.

    You should plan also, and foremost, to make your dreams come true. To satisfy your needs and wants, to lead your life.

    Think about creativity. You can free-flow writing every day and always have something to say. But is there enough continuity?

    If you want to write a book, a longer article, a course, a report, the script for a show or a movie, you need, at the very minimum, to plan some critical steps to go through.

    How to plan

    What should you schedule today that you will do tomorrow? And why?

    For forced events, the answer is easy. Either you comply with requests and obligations, or you don’t. But what about your desires? How do you plan creativity?

    Sometimes you just can’t. You can plan to be in a context in which you will be creative. You can refine your ritual of preparing to create and schedule the right time in the right place to perform it. That would already be an outstanding achievement.

    What to plan

    OK, you’re in the mood. You closed all browser tabs. Your smartphone is off. What shall you do? In this case, you need to have an inspiration bucket. Think about the 100 ideas, for instance. In your ritual, in addition to preparing for creativity, you add the step “Pick an idea.”

    How much to plan

    Start to set any reasonable amount of time you can reserve for your creativity. A Pomodoro Session, which is 25 minutes, is always a good start. Not enough? Discover it when you do it. Adjust accordingly in Pomodoro increments: you might need two or three Pomodoros for a long creative session.

    Where to plan

    You should have one calendar only. Time is linear. You are not multi-dimensional yet. So either you reserve some time for that crucial meeting or get the dog out or cultivate your creativity. Yes, is that important. You should have time slots booked on your calendar with the label “Important Meeting With Client” (to cover up for spying eyes). That Client is you.

  • Write to Live Better

    Write to Live Better

    I am a visual person.

    Drawing requires time, writing can be quick and efficient, so I used to write frequently.

    I always took a lot of notes. I used to draw drafts, diagrams, and abstract scenes, all the time.

    About anything and everything. Ideas for Dungeons & Dragons characters and campaigns. Ideas for Computer Graphics Algorithms. Tasks to do. Things I did. Memorable scenes from a movie. Contact names and details. Concepts related to work: how certain things connect, exemplifying complex structures, Things to research further. Nice words. Funny names.

    Quotes from books or songs.

    A Never Sleeping Brain

    Ideas come to my mind while sleeping or taking a shower—dreams about saving the world. Being a better person, understanding reality.

    I would write about everything and everywhere before the Digital Era.

    I have one great regret: almost all of those writings are gone, forever. What remains is mostly useless now. I have lost its context. What was I thinking? Whose phone number is this? Why was that relevant?

    A massive amount of thoughts was wasted. Those thoughts are part of my life and made me who I am right now, but I have no memory of them and no proof of their existence.

    Writing as Self-Reflection

    When I have some intense feelings or experience important events in my life, I feel the urge to write them down from time to time. They’re private.

    Until I can’t contain them, so, here is the magic, I write about them.

    Where? How? When? for Whom?

    Instead of conceding them to the fate of flying papers, I have my double-backed-up document folder in which I can keep a digital document for more than one year and, hopefully, for more than one century.

    It’s private, and it’s a safe place to think on my own. Nothing is forbidden. Everything is allowed. Of course, I am talking about thinking and writing, don’t get me wrong. Nobody can read my private thoughts. I can think whatever is flowing through my mind. I fear no judgment besides my future self when I will reread it.

    A Safe Space to Change Yourself

    Establishing a safe, secure, comfortable space to store your thoughts, in addition to creating a safe space in the real world to dedicate your focused time to think and write, is something that can change your life forever.

    We’re social beings, but if we don’t have our intimate, safe mental space, we risk never emancipating ourselves, or at the worst, our sanity.

    That is why I write.

    Writing is Thinking and Remembering

    Writing for me is thinking. How can you not think? You are thinking, right now.

    But in a few moments, it’s lost. It’s water flowing in a stream. You have only your memory to help.

    And your memory is severely tied to you being a wonderful but limited human being, with a lot of biases and forces pushing you to adapt your memory to your physical existence. Meaning, you can trust your memory up to a certain point.

    Stop Repeating Thoughts

    One simple consideration bugged me in all of those years: I discovered I used to frequently and repeatedly a certain set of thoughts, since forever.

    Isn’t this a waste of time? How did I evolve? How are my thoughts improved and grown since the first iteration?

    Not as much as if I could keep track of them! Combine them! Evolve them by connecting them!

    Freeze Your Thinking Sessions

    You could develop a fantastic memory and live in a mental palace allowing you to retrieve thoughts and concepts with absolute fidelity. Like when you suspend your working session on your computer, and you resume it precisely from where you were.

    Or, you just write.

    Free your Brain and Keep Track of Your Life

    What happened yesterday? Was it helpful to remember that statement? What was the chain of thoughts leading me to have that breakthrough? What did that client say about my work? How should I change it?

    Think about another thousand questions about moving to the next step of your life.

    Shall you start each time from scratch or trying to make an effort to remember everything?

    Neuroscience says the opposite; the more your brain is clear, the more you can focus on the present time.

    You cannot put everything into your brain.

    That is why you need another place to store your relevant memories. You need an external brain, an augmented one!

    That is why I write.

    Think Better Through Writing

    I want to evolve my thinking. I want to put my thoughts on trial. I want them to become more powerful, more creative, more original, more connected. More!

    What’s the best way to do it?

    Writing.

    It’s only after many failures in trying to build writing habits that I finally succeed.

    I have a lengthy collection of incomplete diaries. Up until 2019. The magic year. On the 24th of September 2019, I started with a commitment to write every single day, for one year, at least 500 words or for at least 30 minutes, and I’ve ended up writing half a million words.

    Write to Live Better

    And then there is life. Making you feel bad, hurt, resentful, angry. You can decide to react according to the moment and, possibly, smashing the first thing at hand. Besides all the possible outcomes of your impulsive reactions, there is a way to learn to be different and better.

    What really can help you in being more conscious and self-aware?

    Writing about how you feel and why.

    Writing about what happened to you and how you reacted.

    Live better. Write.

    I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 11 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 147th daily article in a row.