Consumption

Earlier this year in the peak of the pandemic it dawned on me that I hadn’t really done anything creative in months, if not a full year. My life was mainly exercise and work, and while I had to leverage my problem solving skills, I never quite needed to be creative, to generate something from nothing, nothing but the neural connections deep in my brain.

This was kind of a terrifying thought, a bit of an existential crisis, because it’s not like I was walking around brain dead - I was listening to dozens of podcasts, practicing the piano, reading plenty of books, and consuming content from LinkedIn thought leaders and Hacker News evangelists, but nothing net new was coming from my cerebellum.

I spent a lot of time doing things I would describe as productive, and it led to a feeling that I was going somewhere, becoming the person I wanted to be (that latest Paul Graham essay I just read surely was going to help me become a CEO someday, right?). All that consumption created the illusion of progress.

So, as 2021 progressed, I started phasing out some consumption and started prioritizing more creation. In practice, this looked like me reading 50% fewer books and 80% less news, while trying to make sure that I was getting a few “creative reps” in every day. At the start, what counted as a rep literally did not matter. The goal was to get more practice flexing my creative muscles.

The epiphany reminded me of a lesson I learned in college. Around my sophomore year, I realized that reading the textbook was about a tenth as efficient as doing practice problems. There is no substitute for real world practice. So, as 2021 progressed, I started building my website from scratch. I began improvising on the piano, rather than learning music that other people created. And at the start, I was absolutely terrible at both of these things. But week by week, I just persevered, and got a little better (note that I am still pretty darn awful at improvising, but my website finally doesn’t suck).

I think there’s a compelling argument for creating more and consuming less. What does 30 minutes a day of news get you? Maybe at that next happy hour you’ll be a bit more informed, come across as a bit more well-read. But how about one whole month of spending those 30 minutes creating something? That’s 15 hours to spend on a creative project, something that will leave you feeling more fulfilled and probably make you a lot more interesting at that next happy hour. You’ll learn real skills that are highly additive to the rest of your life.

I still read the news, and I still browse social media. But I’m trying to reframe it - this kind of consumption doesn’t get me anywhere, and I’m trying to stop pretending that it’s anything but entertainment. Recently, I read a rather creative article that summarized a lot of what I had been feeling. I would absolutely recommend it.

Daily check-in: Did I write? Yes Did I run? Yes Did I make music? For like 20 minutes, yes.