"I need to keep consuming information because otherwise I won't have any ideas to create."

That's what I told myself 1 year ago to validate another consumption rabbit hole.

Turns out, I just didn't want to spend energy creating.

But then:

I made 5 realizations for why creation is better than consumption in Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).

Now I create 70%+ of the time.

Here are those 5 reasons:

📆#1. Collecting Can Be Procrastination

Creation is hard.

Consumption is way easier.

It's like the difference between sitting on the couch eating peanut butter and hitting a brutal leg session at the gym.

About a year ago, I used Roam Research as my notetaking app instead of Obsidian. I collected vast amounts of information on online business, spirituality, gamification, and more every week, but I didn't have a medium to create things out of it. I was collecting out of procrastination.

I validated it by saying I needed to "find more ideas."

The issue:

I already had tons of ideas.

Hidden in my notes and past creations was a gold mine of things waiting for me to remix.

I just needed the courage to go through and process it. Our second brain is a time-traveling device between our past, present, and future selves. By leveraging the content inside, we can create more value than doing more consuming.

Who doesn't want to create more value?

🐌#2. Consumption Has Diminishing Returns

The Pareto Principle states that 80% of output comes from 20% of the input.

Applied to consumption, 80% of the value we get from consumption comes from 20% of what we consume. Why is this important? It means we start getting diminishing returns past a certain amount of consumption.

Five online creators have shaped who I am the most:

• Ali Abdaal
• Nicolas Cole
• Dickie Bush
• Nick Milo
• Alex Hormozi

These five people account for 80% of the most valuable content in my creations.

Here's a golden question for you:

What 20% of the information you consume is giving you 80% of your value?

🧠#3. Learning Comes Through Action

The reason we get diminishing returns on consumption is learning comes through action.

We have all felt after consuming something, "I get it."

But do you?

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting at a Cafe with my brother in Indonesia. I consumed for 45 minutes on how to package engaging videos for YouTube. It took me 4 hours and 15 minutes to actualize.

But I learned as a result.

And I got something else:

⚡#4. Action Creates Motivation

Action creates motivation.

Most people consume more than they should because they don't have the motivation to create. This is a misunderstanding of how motivation works. Motivation for hard things rarely comes before doing the hard thing.

IT IS THE DOING of the hard thing that creates the motivation to keep going.

There have been so many times when I don't feel like writing.

But I use a simple trick to do so anyways: I tell myself I only have to create for 5 minutes. If I still don't feel like creating after those 5 minutes, I stop.

But more often than not, I hit my flow, and I keep creating.

Inspiration is a luxury in the creative field.

💸#5. Creation Compounds Your Knowledge Over Time

Sometimes 80% of the work for a project is already finished as soon as I start.

When I first sat down to create my flagship course Obsidian University, I thought it would take me 3 months to write all of the lessons inside. It took me 1 month. I repurposed all the work I had been putting on my YT channel, blog, and newsletter for the past year.

80% of the work was already finished.

Every creation we make forms the building block of future work.

This wouldn't be possible if I was consuming all of the time.

TL;DR

5 Reasons I Create 70%+ Of The Time:

• 📆#1. Collecting Can Be Procrastination

• 🐌#2. Consumption Has Diminishing Returns

• 🧠#3. Learning Comes Through Action

•⚡#4. Action Creates Motivation

• 💸#5. Creation Compounds Your Knowledge Over Time

Here's what I would like to share this week.

📸News From The Channel!

📺Latest On De YouTube - Notion For School Is Dead, Do This Instead: After a year of using Notion for school, I stopped. In this video, I will explain why Notion didn't work for me and the realization I made, which has changed my school notetaking forever.

🎙️Latest On De Podcast - E25 Dr. Oakley How To Supercharge Your School Learning: Dr. Oakley has a diverse background in linguistics going into military service after high school before coming back to get her Ph.D. in engineering. At a young age, she believed she couldn't learn math, but applying active studying techniques and learning how to learn overcame her ambivalence. Using her story and knowledge, she teaches the popular course, Learning How To Learn, and has written many books on learning, including A Mind For Numbers, Mindshift, and Learn Like A Pro.

In this podcast, you will learn the following:

• The mistake most students make learning for school
• Highest leverage studying techniques

💡My Best Insights:

📖Book - The Boron Letters: Legendary copywriter Gary Halbert writes to his son Bond while in prison on the best lessons he knows in improving health, becoming an adult, and making money. It's an incredibly engaging read because of how personal Gary's writing style is!

🎙️Podcast - The Paradox of Pleasure - Hidden Brain: Our modern society has drugified things that previously weren’t drugs by increasing four things:

• Quantity
• Potency
• Novelty

Access We are overloading our brain's dopamine pathways so that the pleasure-pain balance is biased toward pain. We have shifted our brains to generally have a dopamine state lower than baseline. So we feel anxiety, depression, and other negative feelings while nothing bad is happening.

📺YouTube Video - How ‘purpose’ works: In this video, Hamza controversially fights back against the cultural zeitgeist that men shouldn't work too hard, believe we ourselves are enough, and more. He explains one of the reasons men feel so depressed in the modern era is that we aren't actively progressing towards meaningful goals. This video was transformational for me; I highly recommend a listen for any guy struggling with finding their path in life.

✨Quote Of The Week - "Without knowledge, action is useless, and knowledge without action is futile." - Abu Bakr