Jargogled Impressions.

What you learn from creating is 100x richer and denser than what you do while consuming.

Sure, you can consume more quickly and across diverse domains, but what does that give you other than entertainment? Perhaps it is vastly superior to mass market entertainment but it’s entertainment, nonetheless.

Consuming educational content is masked entertainment – you are challenging yourself with learning a new area, but you are passively consuming it. You get a dopamine hit when you are directed to pre-identified trends and patterns and discoveries and you continue down the path to hit that next podcast, that next Ted Talk, that cool “current thing” documentary, that new newsletter writer dissecting another new technology trend.

Consumption without creation is like trying to grab a fistful of knowledge that is flowing like water. Consumption with an intent to create is a powerful multiplier. Every art that exists in the world today started as a copy of something anyways. So, when you pair creation with a ton of mindful consumption, you accelerate your creative process. Murakami says in his book “Novelist as a vocation” that reading a ton of books earlier on in his life, whether good or trashy, helped him develop a muscle for intuiting writing that resonates and channeled his observational powers to serve him for a good four decades of operating as a novelist.

When you create, you have skin in the game. By creating content and showing it to the world, you are putting yourself out there and taking risks. In the age of an abundance of information, this is indeed risky and puts you in a vulnerable position. It is for this reason that I sympathize with those who are trying to create – even if a viral TikTok post – creation is hard and yet the world will be better off if we created more than we consumed. So, all hail the wannabe influencers of today and tomorrow. While the posts are “cringe” often and derived/plagiarized/secondary almost always – it’s an act of creation, nonetheless. The influencers who are in for the long haul, who have something to say, who feel a strong undercurrent of noticing the world that lends itself to their unique expressive voice – these are the ones who focus more on their content than on themselves. Their self-doubt isn’t on whether they are a good creator, but whether their outputs are good or not.

When you are trying to create, you realize how hard it is to really understand something and how deceptively easy the great creators make it for you to consume. You realize there’s an unknowable void you are staring at as you dig an inch deeper into the topic. You realize the treasures that await you, and you get scared knowing that you do not have the vessel to hold on to it.

When you create, you are forced to apply what little you know and think deeply about the subject matter. Through iterations and persistent work-in-progress experiments, the blocks of understanding start piling up. As it does, so does your ability to find patterns where you could not before. And that’s enthralling because it’s a discovery of your own.

Our senses and mental faculty are largely driven by mental models that we or evolution has created to make our life easier. These models work mostly to our advantage when we are on territories that haven’t changed since time immemorial – the intuitions and natural affinities, proclivities, afflictions, and allergies that are nature’s endowment to us via the long-drawn process of evolution.

Evolution itself is nature’s ultimate act of creation. With each subsequent step of creation, this act evolves and so does the depth and richness of its understanding.  

When you consume to create, you are in a fertile territory. Because you are chasing a question you want to answer through your creation, you are more directed and focused. That plunging void you sensed when peeking into the dark corridors of a new domain? It suddenly seems approachable because you don’t actually need to hoard all of it anyway. So, you become more directed and focused. You can sift through noise to plunge into the heart of the matter, the golden kernel of understanding that begets first-principle thinking.

If you turn this into a process, you have with you a superpower. This process of approaching things with a mindset to create – consuming things that help you fetch ideas for your creation, and then jumping back into creation. This process is what’s common across the slate of artists and how they approach their craft. It sounds glamorous, but it really is a tale of grit and persistence. Processes aren’t complex in themselves. They are sometimes complicated but there is nothing that discipline cannot fix. Here’s Quentin Tarantino describing how he obsessively studied his favorite filmmakers. In the Netflix documentary on Yash Raj Films, Aditya Chopra, who made Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, mentions how he obsessively watched all kinds of movies (and still does) to learn and unlearn his craft. Conspicuous consumption, with intent and bias towards creation, can be a magical potent for artistic success.

Honing and maintaining a bias towards creation isn’t easy though. Many authors, song writers, film makers struggle to go beyond their initial inspiration because they fail to turn their pursuit of that which is true (art) into a process. A tendency to aggrandize the importance of our art further pushes fun away and makes this process un-sustainable.

Staring at that blank sheet of paper? Do yourself a favor and lower your expectations. Perfection is the enemy of output, and you’d do well just to get started and prepare yourself to tap into the invisible daemon that may one day speak to you. All you do before then is to attune your senses, build your muscle, and have fun.

Creative flourishing is mankind’s greatest of pleasures. It’s the ultimate aim of every person alive. And it’s in fact a process – something that takes mere seconds to understand, but more than a lifetime to master. The act of creation is a game that’s worth playing just because. An infinite game that is played to keep the game on indefinitely.