Achieve and improve by going from consumer to producer

24 Mar 2018 3-minute read

Last wednesday I woke up and saw the following on my instagram through the Gary Vaynerchuk stories:

The Gary V empty survey

I normally never do any of these but gave it a shot nonetheless. This gave me the following result:

The Gary V filled in survey

I tried to fill it in as honestly as possible. The conclusion was that I was super thankful for the life I can live. All the mistakes I make are mine and I love giving back to the community.

But the top two might surprise you. Even though I dwell more I still think I’m focused. And that is what I want to go deeper into in this article.

The check on focusing is mostly applied to my work for my clients. Whenever something new comes in I’m pumped and cannot wait to start on it. Hence the focusing.

But then why the dwelling you might ask? My own projects do not get the same level of attention as my client work. I’m talking about the ideas that I have for applications and websites, this blog, my social media and the idea of starting a vlog.

All of these get send to the backlog. Instead when I have time to do these I start dwelling on my ideas. This makes it that I start consuming more and more articles instead of working on something.

This is what we call the consumer mindset. Instead of being an active maker in the world the people with the consumer mindset will only consume.
This can range from articles to books, from movies to instagram stories, from vlogs to music.

This does not mean having a consumer mindset is a bad thing however. It purely depends on what you want to achieve in live.
I, for one, am someone with a lot of dreams and ambition. But they are currently not mapped to my actions.

So I have to develop a producer mindset. A producer is someone who will create. Wether it be art, music, movies, applications, websites or something else. The possibilities are endless.

The beauty about being a producer is you sit there, and you explore ideas which become a passion, which slowly becomes a reality. — Michelle Yeoh

This quote tells it well. I want my ideas to become more than that. I want them to become passions and in the end reality.

Does this mean we have to give up on consuming? Not at all, but there needs to be a well thought out balance between the two.
Only consuming will give you no results. But only producing will keep you in the dark for new information.

Think about wether you are a consumer or a producer. Is this what you really want of do you want to redefine the balance between the two?