Consumption — How can it benefit ?

Consumption can increase taste but not proficiency.

For example

• Reading doesn’t make you a great writer.
• Watching movies doesn’t make you a great filmmaker.
• Eating doesn’t make you a great chef.

Studying other people’s work doesn’t teach you nearly as much as practicing your own.

Ofcourse, reading can give you ideas and make your concepts more clearer. Doing something ourselves is by far the most effective way to learn it. In doing it, we’re collapsing all the possibilities of approaching it into an experience that we know either works or doesn’t work and then iterating from there. There is a clear distinction between learning by consumption and learning by practice. The only thing to be mindful of here is to be on track of a particular thought in the chaos.

On the contrary, some pointers say great work is done by people who aren’t trained in the skill. By doing so, they became proficient in it, and their abilities were honed more when they were tried in an amok way, without the structure education provided. Examples being

Nolan and Cameron on filmmaking

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — Business

Writing without reading can still produce a great writer, but it only partially holds good. Consumtion is essential, and we all enjoy it. Now, the point is how much to consume and how to use it in our days of digital explosion. You pick up your device to write but get swayed to read a post, which turns into reading articles, posts, reels, memes, and so on. It’s already 2 hours since this so-called “research” was happening in which the topic for writing was Topic 1, but we seemed to have pointers for Topics 2, 3, and 4, which are unrelated. By now staggered and overwhelmed brain these additional topic reference can get lost also, and might have hazy ideas on Topic 1. Holding on to threads is a skill that needs development in this case.

My way to do it is to store topics 2,3, and 4 in the respective writing topics folder for future reference. Those reference are safe there till we get back to it. Still dwelling on the topic 1 and being at it after that 2 hours of meandering in the hazy waves of the internet is the key. Not necessarily when you look back, the stored topics can make sense, but if it has resonated with you once, it would come back, and some points on them can be written. That’s the process working for me.

So, for taste, I consume, store, review, and repeat. However, there is a process not to be consumed in the whirlpool of information overload. This is my method of publishing a blog a day on varied topics, including feminism, woman empowerment, workplace ethics, Digital Marketing, Mental Health, the Journey of life, fitness, food, empty nest, and much more.

Do you have a better method?