Consume less, Create more.

If I had to pick one goal for 2010 it would be this: Consume less, Create more.

So what does that mean?

Consume Less

We are window shoppers in a world full of windows. There is more out there to look at, read and watch than ever before. Most would say this is a boon, a tidal wave of creativity now available for easy consumption whenever, however, and by whomever. And I would agree, to some extent that it is. But this ease of consumption, this easy availability of stuff and things wherever we turn has made for a noisy, distracted existence. More and more we feel like we need to be watching or reading or participating in things in order to keep up and stay on top of what is happening out there with our friends, for our jobs, or because we think we might miss something important.

This cacophony takes up a lot of time. How much time each day is spent on Facebook? On Twitter? Surfing Flickr or Ffffound? Once started it’s easy to spend hours engaged in jumping from one place to the other. We build up an giant mound of stuff that we feel required to consume because it will make us more informed or more inspired. We open tabs upon tabs of interesting stuff with the intent of consuming it but because there is always something new to look at we never make it through everything and inevitably, the browser crashes and all that supposed knowledge gets lost, unconsumed. We mourn, then we breathe a sigh of relief and start the hoarding process again.

This act of mass and constant consumption reflects negatively on the act of doing. We go searching for inspiration and then once inspired can’t draw ourselves away. There’s always something else out there to look at. So we look and we look and the doing gets put off until later because we need more inspiration or it’s too late to start. We window shop without actually doing any buying.

Create More

Join the doers. Create noise, don’t just consume it. It sounds easy but it’s often hard to break away from the hypnotic lull of consumption. We need to learn how to limit our consumption so it doesn’t overwhelm us. So we can use it as it should be used to make us think and inspire us.

The first step, is admitting we have a problem. Once we acknowledge that what should be inspiring us is instead preventing us from doing the things we intend it gets easier to break away. By limiting our consumption we are free to spend time thinking on our own. Digesting the information we’ve consumed and interpreting it in our own ways. By taking a step back, giving ourselves time and space to think about what we have seen, heard, and read we allow ourselves to form our own opinions, go off on our own paths and find something to create or talk about that wasn’t there before.

By freeing ourselves from consuming all the time, we allow ourselves to be more creative.

posted 7 months, 3 weeks, 6 days, 6 hours, 40 minutes ago     Notes (0)