To Create, you have to Consume

There is this weird notion around the “productivity” gurus that stood against media consumptions.

“You have to create.”

“Consumptions causes brain rot.”

This is weird.

Almost nothing in life is creative out of thin air, every idea is a distillation from other ideas, comes together in a specific moment — that is creativity.

Nothing is truly original.

iPhone is a combination of an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.

TBPN is a combination of a sports show and tech nerds talking about tech.

Minecraft is a combination of LEGO, survival games, and procedural worlds.

Game of Thrones is a combination of English history, mythology, and fictional creatures that existed thousand of years before Game of Thrones.

Toy Story is inspired from the 1988 Oscar-winning animated short film Tin Toy.

Creativity is recombination, not creation from a vacuum. Nothing is created out of nothing. Creativity is taking existing ideas, experiences, formats, or technologies and combining them into something that feels new.

Originality lives in the combination.

One will not be able to “create” without consuming tons of books, tons of movies, tons of short form videos, tons of YouTube videos, tons of musics, and tons of shitty opinions that people dumping out in the world.

That is beautiful.

Consume more, create even more.

Don’t reject consumption, take inspirations from the world. Ingest them. Feel them. Let all of it sit somewhere in your brain.

Who knows when the light bulb will flicker above your head?

Two quotes from Steve Jobs himself.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path; and that will make all the difference.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.