Consuming isn’t learning
Match your input and output
I used to be an excellent consumer, probably the perfect one that social apps or influencers expect. I could spend a whole evening just watching podcasts, reading, or scrolling, feeling like I was learning or growing. But I started to feel overwhelmed. Although it was really interesting information, I wasn’t retaining it or using it.
So what’s the point of consuming if you are not doing anything with it?
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Nowadays it’s really easy to fall into this trap. We are overloaded with content, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until we close them at night. Millions of sites, blogs, papers, articles, posts, reels. Each year briefer and faster, just to hook you, probably not to make you think. One could spend their whole life just reading and consuming, and I won’t judge you.
I realized consuming is the easy part. If your objective is to learn, receiving always comes before producing. It’s much simpler to hear and read than to write or speak. That difficulty is the point: struggle creates knowledge, and it forces your brain to work differently and strengthen what the input started. Psychologists call it the generation effect: what you produce yourself, you remember better.
This is even more important in this era, in which everything is designed to capture your attention for someone else’s ideas. Producing is how you attend to your own. It improves your communication, your critical thinking, and your understanding of what you consume.
So this post is my promise to change my approach. For every topic I want to improve, I’ll match input with output: write down my thoughts and extend the conversation, or just summarize the key takeaways I found.
The goal is personal: to stay active and conscientious in a tech era that is rushing through our lives and, with that, taking away our capability to think for ourselves.
