Dear Artists: What's Your Consumer To Creator Ratio?
You’ve watched Netflix in the last week. You fell into a “YouTube hole” a couple days ago. And last night, you got sucked into a Buzzfeed binge session.
There’s no shame in this. I consume a lot of content too. But we rarely stop to consider how much we create compared to how much we consume.
In Western society, most of us are happy to just consume the art that others make. Why create your own? We watch Netflix, but never consider picking up a video camera ourselves.
For your average person, this works. No correction needed.
However, if you’re an artist, it’s worth considering how much you consume versus how much you create.
This is especially true if you have art projects that you haven’t finished or started yet.
Sure. Consuming art is important. It can lead to inspiration and motivation. But most of us are devoting too much time to consuming rather than creating.
It’s a worthy experiment to try creating more than you consume for a couple weeks.
What do you notice?
How do your thoughts change?
How does it feel?
Who knows what the answer to those questions will be. That’s up to you to find out. The only thing that I can guarantee is that more of your art will actually get made.
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hi friends greetings from Venezuela, very good post, I liked the image very much, I would like to have a little more time with this borrowed computer, to make a better constructive criticism, but I will be giving my contribution with my vote and this short comment of his post, nothing more to say his amgo always @manduto are wanted 🙌
yee boi.
aw yee :P
I lost my ability to enjoy most 'entertainment' a long time ago. I DO read a lot, but some of that is networking, which is where I find it really hard to balance. How do you balance that? I feel like I'm doing fairly good most of the time at not spending too much of my time 'consuming' unless I'm dealing with writer's block, but I also know that I can allow that to kind of be an excuse.
Ugh. Thanks for the reminder. Again. You're really good at picking out the things that I need to acknowledge and deal with. Great minds and all that, maybe?
Great post, as always!
It's really tough in today's society. Takes a lot of self discipline and focus to create. For me I know that I consume lot more than I create because creating seems to take up so much more time then consuming. Unfortunately I can't draw to save my life 😂 but we all can create differently in our own way. Hmm....I should try my hand at drawing. I should enjoy it...but...time where you??! 😆