Input without output is just entertainment
I’ve spent years consuming. Books. Podcasts. Articles. Courses. Rabbit holes that start with one question and end three hours later with forty browser tabs open. I told myself this was growth. Learning. Investment in myself. Entertainment dressed up as productivity.
The books blur together. The podcasts fade. That course I took? Couldn’t tell you three things from it. But the things I’ve made? Those I remember. The blog post I wrote in 2018 about dynamic distribution groups - I can still recall the logic. The Power Automate flow I built to update on-call schedules - I could rebuild it tomorrow. The conversation I had last week where I explained something out loud - crystallised in a way that reading about it never did. Creation is how learning becomes permanent.
There’s a formula I keep coming back to: consumption, processing, output, feedback, refinement. Most people stop at consumption. Maybe some processing - highlighting, note-taking, nodding along. But without output, there’s no feedback. Without feedback, there’s no refinement. And without refinement, you’re not really learning. You’re just passing time in a way that feels virtuous.
Writing is the output that’s always available. And writing, it turns out, is how I think. The act of putting words down forces clarity. Fuzzy ideas get sharp or get cut. The stuff I thought I understood reveals itself as half-baked. The blog isn’t a marketing channel. It’s a thinking tool that happens to be public.
The other output that’s always available: teaching. Explaining something to someone else is the ultimate test of whether you actually understand it. The questions they ask expose the gaps. The blank stare tells you when you’ve lost the thread. I’ve learned more from teaching than from any book
So the shift, for every hour of input, some output. Doesn’t have to be polished. Doesn’t have to be public. But something has to come out. Jotting down some notes with arc. A blog post. A conversation. A framework sketched on paper. An explanation to my kids. The goal isn’t content creation. It’s content processing. The output is proof that the input actually landed.
If you’re consuming endlessly and feeling like it’s not sticking - it’s not you. It’s the missing step. Input without output is just entertainment.