Consumption vs. Creation
“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
Here's something I've found helpful in my work in supporting productivity: Understanding the difference between consumption mode and creation mode. If you're reading this, the world you were born into has encouraged you to default to consumption mode through your education (memorize what we give you and repeat), the ubiquity of advertising (trust us, you need to buy this), politics (here's the party line), organized religion (this is what you should believe and do), family (here's who you are), and on and on. There's great reward for accepting and conforming to what is handed to us, and that's not necessarily a bad thing! Humans are social animals, so being part of groups is essential to our health and well being. Societal structures help us to create and maintain the stability needed to foster decent standards of living and opportunities to pursue our own personal flavor of happiness, while still feeling like we're part of something larger than ourselves. But it's all too easy to become entranced by all the expectations we encounter, and caught up in endless contemplation of what's expected. Not to mention anxiety about whether we're measuring up, and what will happen if we don't.
If that's where we're living, we're not going to spend much time in creation mode. Creativity thrives outside the strictures of imposed expectations. It requires that you free your mind from established patterns and allow your own unique internal spark to lead the way to something fresh and new. For children, this is easy. For the first several years of life, they don't understand or care much about what anyone else thinks unless behaving a certain way leads to a catastrophic withdrawal of love by family members, but even then they're likely to try to get around the rules. As they get older, they will often realize that it's a lot safer and easier to conform to expectations, lose the imaginary friend, and at the very least perfect an extremely convincing impression of a compliant member of all applicable groups. The desire to be accepted and belong is very compelling during the teen years in particular; if we're not careful, we can get stuck in the patterns of fear-driven compliance, which tends to keep our lives small and confining.
If you want to have access to your creative engine, or work up to being a creative genius, priming the pump with inspiration is important, but it's also essential to turn off the barrage of information and expectation from outside. You must learn to think of yourself as a creator, prioritize making time and space for creative urges to bubble up, and be ready to take action to bring your creations into reality. How you share them with others is up to you, but you'll never get started if you don't find ways to carve out an oasis of self. You may find that this is hard to do because it's so easy to be pulled every which way by so many other things that seem important, especially when you have no guarantee of what you'll produce during this time. You may feel pressure to come out of it with concrete results, and frustration if you don't. It takes courage to stand for something you want that takes solitary effort, especially when it takes time to find one's stride—and it always does when starting something new. How can you know how music you can write in a given amount of time until you try? Obviously you can't! Especially if you've never written a song before in your life.
Even if the steps toward a goal seem very methodical and concrete, you will find that you need to bring your creativity to bear on how to accomplish each task, since you are a unique human being with many needs and desires to balance throughout your project. Sticking with the program requires focus and discipline, and the decision to put aside distractions to bring about the result you want.
No matter what you're working toward, you'll be more successful if you acknowledge that you are choosing to be in creation mode when it's time to work. Acknowledge yourself for having the strength of spirit to go out on a limb alone over the dark chasm of the unknown. Appreciate your desire and your ability to bring new ideas and constructs into being. Focus on bringing forth rather than bringing in. And make sure you still allow yourself some consumption time in order to relax, renew, and stimulate new thoughts and sensations that will feed into your work. You may have noticed that ideas tend to crop up at unexpected moments when you're relaxing and doing undemanding tasks like taking a walk or a shower. This time is important too, because your mind isn't engaged in anything demanding, but you're also not trying too hard either. The right mix of time spent in various states of mind will be something for you to experiment with as you pursue your most productive and satisfying life.
This distinction between consumption and creative mode has really helped me to remember what's important to me as I forego other interesting activities that might otherwise distract me from producing the stuff of my goals. I hope this concept helps you to find a balance between the two that suits your forward movement in the context of your unique life.