Evaluate this to Become Vastly More Productive: Consumption vs Production Learning
Where do you fall in the consumption-production scale?
I noticed that my days on average was on the consumption side. It’s kind of like demand-side vs supply-side. You want to err to the supply side.
How much time am I spending consuming YT videos rather than making them? I learn from consumption, but I can learn even more making them.
Listening to songs on the piano rather than composing songs on the piano? While listening is immensely important in piano playing and being a musician, composing songs are an order of magnitude higher on the progress scale. When I compose songs, I automatically have to learn about note time values, how different harmonic progressions effect the feel of the song, and experience the effect of changing various parameters of music.
How much time do you spend scrolling Instagram rather than creating Instagram posts?
I don’t know about your evaluations, but for me, being completely honest, it’s heavily skewed to the consumption side. And that’s with me already aware of this concept in my head, but not in my heart.
It’s the same reason why writing is so good for you. It’s a production-side activity. It’s easy to be a consumer of goods and be judgmental, but more than half the time if you’ve never been on the other end of the spectrum to be the person who’s actually building the product, you miss so much of the detail. The fact is, writing this article will help me become more aware of this concept and develop my thoughts about this topic at a deeper level. I’m writing as much for myself as I am for you reading this. It also gives the extra incentive to make it as condensed and presentable to other people, which translates to making it as condensed and presentable to myself. It’s a filtering out and cleaning of the noise in the self talk you have with yourself.
That’s what I strive to do — have the highest quality self-talk possible. There are two parts of my identity: the one that listens to myself, and the one that teaches myself. It seems weird to divide yourself into more than one, but it’s often a helpful mental trick because different personalities within me often fight. And I intuitively know which one is better. It’s just a matter of who wins: the better one or the self-sabotaging one.
If you think about it, this is definitely the most powerful long term strategy. Become a master of creating, and you will not know it, you will become it. If you simply want to know it, then consume. If you want to become it, produce.
