Just like sitting down, consuming content is really bad for you. But really comfortable, I don’t know what other qualifier to use than “really” but I mean catastrophically or existentially.
It determines whether you will be a consumer or a creator.
This is existential because only if you are a creator can you share in the value of what you have created.
Money/Status is a downstream effect of Value created and value a downstream effect (DE) of Execution.
Execution is a DE of knowledge + creation. I was going to multiply them, I think the effect is only multiplicatory when you have the 2 variables in high amounts = massive non-linear leverage.
Otherwise, it is additional effect, you have lots of knowledge and 0 creation power and create some execution i.e., consultants. You can have lots of creation power and have high execution but with 0 knowledge, your work may be useless. But the creation of something, literally anything, forces you to have knowledge. Maybe not in the beginning, but sure as hell at the end.
Caveat: I may have gotten the relationships between these vectors wrong.
I also think I consume a lot of content as a form of mental masturbation or gratification. Like, I don’t take time to sit with really hard concepts I see - but I consume a lot of quantity and therefore it feels like I have done a lot of work. There was an Andrej Karpathy video that spoke about how to be great, you need to be doing your 10000 hours. These hours should feel like you are actually in a physical gym where you are mentally getting exhausted - this comes from creating a lot of things or 1 thing, but getting stuck and figuring out a way.
Another aspect of this is the mental laziness that is a byproduct of consumption. You are constantly critiquing what others have made and therefore makes you think you are a good judge when, in effect, without understanding the set of constraints and possible options, risks, etc, at the time of making, it is hard to understand the context of the output. Hence why we see a lot of leniency amongst experts who are at the edge of AI, for example
Thirdly, it is making me very reactive - I often have an objective when I am in the mood, I get home, open X, and then all of that goes out the window. Because I am reacting to something I have just seen. This massively delays my speed of execution and highlights a problem with my current systems in place to catch out these mistakes and procrastination.
This consumption over creation phase I was in - hid the lack of systems and the lack of output, I have had over the last 5 years.
The Elon quote, which is very often laughed at “What did you get done last week?”. It gets right down to it - where is my output? - not my intention because my outputs will compound.