Production vs Consumption is one of the main concepts I feel that every person who wants to have a major impact must understand.
It seems to me that we live in a “consumer society.” We have been indoctrinated from our youth with a buy this, consume that mentality. Consume TV, buy products, watch movies, and on and on.
People who want to have an impact on the world or just the little world around them NEED to move from a consumption mentality to a production mentality.
Instead of watching media they need to produce media. Instead of consuming products they need to produce products.
Instead of reading books they need to write them. And instead of reading posts they need to post.
Consumption is important as it gives us ideas and inspiration for our own productions. But at some point we have to turn down the “in” and turn on the “out.” If we want to be among the savvy we need to produce more and consume less.
I have a bad habit of obsessively consuming new books and ideas of others. I have learnt a great deal from their thoughts and I highly recommend taking in intelligent inputs.
However I feel the need more and more to turn down the amount I take in and instead pump out more of my own.
I need to leave the consuming to someone else.
As part of that I have decided that I need to make posting to my websites/blogs as easy as possible. And to do so I am using TDO mini forms.
TDO mini forms is an awesome wordpress plugin that allows you to create forms that submit content as post or pages.
With it you can (for one example) allow your users, readers, etc. to add to a list. The possibilities are near limitless for TDO mini form use.
I am using it on my sites for my on “quick rants.” Whenever I find something new, whenever I have a burning idea, I can publish easily without hassle.
So instead of saving some info or link as a to do in RememberTheMilk.com I now post it to the blog and talk about how it is useful.
Thus I am producing content about the things I come into contact with.
Ok. Now I am just rambling.
But I hope you will think about production vs. consumption.
I think it is key.