Tag: writing

I spent more time doing logistics and bureaucracy than doing creative work. And I hated it!

Tomorrow I will officially launch the first group of Challengers in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Habit Challenge. It took me so many years to find the courage and the focus to prepare for this project, and now I am not writing daily alone anymore. I have a group of fellow Writing Challengers that will write with me every day for one month.

And that’s what I want to do. I want to write. I want to explore my thoughts, develop them and share my ideas with the world. But as a group facilitator and challenge organizer, I have other duties coming first: to make things work, to allow collaboration to happen, to prepare the space for collective creativity. That goes in addition to promoting the Challenge, gently cultivating conversations with potential subscribers, and setting up online venues to host them. And I also need to configure all software tools, platforms, plug-ins, extensions, accounts, folders, files, sheets, and what not to allow them to work undisturbed.

That requires a tremendous amount of effort. So, while I wanted to organize the writing prompts, prepare writing paths, and give creative fuel to my group, I’ve spent most of that little time devoted to this project to do the single most boring and uncreative activity: logistics.

I felt frustrated, and I’ve never desired so much to get help or be able to “script” and automate all of the repetitive actions. I’ve spent an interminable time to add a new account, add a new folder, add a new row, add a new email, and add a new item to dozens of lists, multiplied by dozens.

Here’s another valuable lesson from this project before it even begins: automate and simplify your life. It’s a powerful strategy to reserve more time and resources for more creative activities.

If you want to be more creative while avoiding killing your ideas by doing boring (but essential) logistical work: simplify processes, rules, and procedures and automate all the possible. You will have more time to nurture your creativity.

You can think better when you write. You’re focused on putting one word after the other. Sometimes the pen is slower than your thought. Some other your fingers are faster than your brain. You are forced to make sense and to express concepts in a meaningful order. Or to capture that idea in a way you will be able to retrieve in the future.

You can save thoughts for later. You would lose the majority of your thoughts if you didn’t write. Not a big deal. Unless you have a lot of exciting ideas and you keep on losing them. Writing put them in a vault, forever. (Remember to do backup).

You can be more focused when you write. Unless you’re typing while taking the metro or crossing a street in Tokyo. Still, you are in your world when you are writing. Can you listen to that voice inside your head spelling the exact words you are reading? When you write, that voice is not mine but yours. It’s you thinking and dumping words on paper or pixels. It’s a unique relationship between your brain and your fingers. Can you think of anything more intimate than that? (Well, OK…)

You can collect your thoughts when you write. There’s no storm taking them away from you. Not even time would. They have been materialized in tiny drops of inks on dead wood or stored in an unending sequence of zeros and ones kept alive only by physics. (Remember to do backup). And then, you can get them out again, revise, compare, elaborate. You can keep on thinking about it.

Writing is augmenting and expanding thinking through time.

Do you want to think better?

Write.

Write now.

Annamaria Testa is one of my favorite authors. She has been speaking, teaching, and writing about creativity for several years as a creative director, teacher, and book author. She is also a blogger, Italian only, at Nuovo e Utile.

I had the pleasure of attending one of her online seminars. She talked about the climate crisis and the severe problems we have with the environment. So I’ve asked her, as average human beings living everyday lives, what can we do to face such complex issues?

She gave me one of the best answers that inspired me to do what I’m doing. She said: “you just have to talk about it. It’s one of the most powerful things you can do”.

I was really impressed by the simplicity and the power of such an answer, which gave me even more motivation to write on my blog everyday.

I would take this lesson by saying that if you have something at heart, something that you care about: talk about it. That is the most simple and powerful thing you can do.

What if you cannot talk?

Write about it!

Write what you care about.

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

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

These are mine.

What are yours? Come writing them in the next Daily Writing Challenge of CREAZEE!

I have one goal. To make you write. Everyday.

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

What counts is that you write about both of those events.

I will ask you questions. A lot. Also those questions that are uncomfortable and will make you uneasy. Especially those. You have to face and overcome your fears, your blind spots, your inertia.

I will facilitate the process of creating your process. There are no formulas, no equations, no guaranteed results. It depends on you, on your preparation. And on your willingness to explore that area of your creativity, you have always had an intuition.

It’s not a course or a lecture, not in any of their traditional senses. It’s a facilitated journey in which you have to do the hardest part of the job. In the beginning, it could be discomforting, disorienting, and challenging. Only after having felt the uneasiness of facing your creative self for several days you will start to feel new emotions: curiosity about pushing it further; new ideas coming to your mind; the joy of creation; the satisfaction of seeing, little by little, brick by brick, the building up of your creative work.

When in the end, you will look back at your incredible journey, you will struggle to believe it.

• Is that what I created?
• How could I create so many ideas?
• Why didn’t I start earlier to create?
• Why should I stop now?

You will feel different, better, renewed, full of energy for doing now that you will want to do it again.

What are you waiting for? You just have to start.

Do you want to become CREAZEEve?

Join CREAZEE, now!