I’m addicted to food. There, I said it.
I really love to eat. Especially pizza and delicious bread. As you might imagine, I have some weight to lose due to my addiction. The addiction is crippling sometimes. It makes me feel depressed, like I’ll never make progress, and like every time I eat I’m making my situation worse.
But this tarnished (and unreasonable) mindset is what addiction—of any kind—does to a person.
There’s a new addiction in this age of the Internet that we’re not talking about enough: A content addiction.
We’re addicted to new content.
This is true whether it’s entertainment or educational content—sometimes both.
I abuse food sometimes. But food is a necessary evil.
I’ve also been known to abuse content (as I’m sure you have, too), but it’s also a necessary evil.
Here’s the good news: If something can be abused, that means it can be used! Here’s my take on content when it’s being used versus abused:
Used:
To learn a new skill or idea (just-in-time preferred).
To promote creative curiosity.
To refresh your memory.
To aid mastery.
To get inspiration.
To take a break.
Abused:
To procrastinate.
To kill time.
To justify not doing something actually more important.
To learn endlessly without doing.
To search for the silver bullet.
To fill up silence.
The wise King Solomon said, “But beyond these, my son, be warned: there is no end to the making of many books, and much study wearies the body.”
Thousands of years ago, too much content was already a problem!
What I’m asking you to do is be more intentional.
Does it really make sense to turn on your podcast playlist every time you’re in the car?
What if you decided to take a week off of that and spend your time thinking about moves you can make in your business?
Instead of spending the more consuming on YouTube, why not spend the same time writing or working on a YouTube video of your own?
To be clear—I love content—both creating and consuming.
There’s absolutely a time for both. A new book just came out today, and I plan to consume it, for sure!
But we often use content as a way to escape. If instead we simply did what most of the content we read tells us, we’d be far ahead and the game.
And ironically—if we did that—we’d probably have more time on our hands to… consume content 😀
Make a commitment to contribute more than you consume.
What about you? Have you found yourself in this trap before? Let me know in the comments and let’s talk about it.