Consuming content and learning is essential to becoming great at anything, but the best way to learn is to take action at an increasingly rapid pace rather than just sticking to content consumption. Action taking teaches lessons and helps you improve in ways that are impossible to learn from just content consumption. Content consumption provides a strong base for the action we take. I personally use content consumption the most when I’m trying to understand a new premise. I then take that premise and put it into practice so I can learn from it by taking action. Sometimes, content overconsumption can become a form of procrastination and provide an unwarranted sense of productivity to people in this boat. There is only so much you can learn without taking action and those who have the most fear tend to fall into this camp. You may ask, “What’s the best course of action to take if this is me?”. The answer is difficult yet rather simple and frank.
Face fear and eliminate “productive” procrastination
As we talked about earlier, many people avoid action by consuming content in order to feel as though they are still being productive and just need to learn that “one more thing” to ensure they don’t make any mistakes. There is no way to avoid mistakes or get around the fact you will make some. If you see yourself as someone who does this, you’re not alone. However, this blog is going to tell you something you don’t want to hear. It won’t get any easier to take that action. You don’t need to learn that “one more thing”, and you’ll more than likely make some mistakes no matter how prepared you are. Getting over and conquering that fear of getting started doing something and taking action is the only solution to this problem of content induced procrastination. It may not be what you want to hear, but it’s the hard truth and you’ll have to internalize and cope with it as best you can.
When is content consumption a good idea?
Content consumption is key to understanding anything new and developing the base of knowledge to then go and take action on. A rule that Real Estate Investor Pace Morby preaches to his students is that for every hour of content consumption, you must then take two hours of action. In other words, you should be consuming just enough to go out and take immediate action on what you have been learning. I personally have struggled finding this balance in the past where action and content consumption is concerned. On one hand, I used to be fully enthralled in content consumption to the point of inaction, and lately, I’ve been taking so much action I haven’t given myself time to learn and improve through content consumption. Working out a balance is crucial. Right now, I am experimenting with content consumption in terms of books and videos both early in the morning or at night when I’ve finished everything I wanted to for the day. At the end of the day, it’s completely up to you and your preferences to pick what works best for you. Just remember the rule of thumb that for every hour of content consumption, you should be taking 2 hours of action.
How do I make sure I’m staying out of the rabbit hole?
The content consumption rabbit hole is a real one and it presents a real and immense issue if you give into it. What I define as the rabbit hole is just needing to learn that “one thing” every day to make sure you don’t make any mistakes. The best thing to do if this is you is to stop and recognize this behavior and its detriments. The next course of action would be to understand where you should be taking action on what you’ve learned and implement it immediately before moving on to the next subject. For example, if your goal is to learn about the stock market and you spend hours reading books and watching videos, make sure you’re taking imperfect action along the way to put your knowledge into real-life practice. This will solidify and enhance your learning experience significantly so that you retain and build on the base you’ve built for yourself. If you consume content in a specific area and never take action on it and then move on to content consumption in another area, it is more than likely you won’t retain much at all. Developing and trying to improve one skillset at a time is the best way to go about learning at the highest level. Make sure you’re actively applying what you learn from the content you consume on a daily basis because real growth and lessons come from pushing yourself through feelings of discomfort.