There’s been this idea sitting on me for a while. Due to the high dopamine nature of many of the activities we do on a daily basis including feed based algorithm consumption, I find it’s easy to end up consuming wayy more than creating.
What i’ve concluded over time is the ratio of what an individual creates vs consumes on a daily basis is a good measure on high agency.
But to put this into perspective let’s look at something almost all of us do, watching youtube. For years, I always consumed videos, either for knowledge or just enjoyment. However, I never used to think what it’s like on the other side. Often times in these informative, videos like tutorials or product demos, they don’t know a lot more than you. But they have this trait in common, curiosity and sharing that curiosity with the world through film. Don’t we all have insightful ideas that could be shared, whether through a blog, video, tweet, reel, or literally anything else on our internet.
Here’s another common example for us engineers. Let’s say you are interested in learning a new web framework. Learning by nature is abstract, especially with something not having a clear learning path. You absorb content on the fly and our monkey minds learn the content through osmosis. In the past, I found myself in tutorial hell, constantly watching youtube videos hoping to find something that doesn’t exist. An expert to perfectly teach me everything is too idealistic. Whereas, someone with high agency doesn’t act with this hesitant nature and just starts building by reading the docs, cloning projects, and working with code straight away.
This is definitely a topic explored by many other creators, but in some ways this blog itself is an initiative for me to make that shift from consumption → creation.