7 intentional ideas that I’ve adopted to navigate the voyage through passive content consumption onto proactive writing
The modern world is designed like a 26 mile obstacle course for creatives with distractions and hindrances hijacking our attention and motivation at every turn.
There is only so much stimulus we can process at any one moment, and often we can become our very own worst enemy, sabotaging our focus or worse, lulling ourselves into passive consumption.
Passion and perseverance are often touted as the recipe for success, but if these are your only running shoes then your feet won’t take you to the finish line.
It’s just not enough, these days.
Instead, apply these 7 proactive ideas with intention into your vocation and keep the dopamine receptors at bay whilst you produce your best work.
- Use Radical Interaction to snap out of voyeuristic tendencies
Doom-scrolling is a real thing — it’s terribly addictive and it’s been hard-wired into us by data scientists.
Your resilience and self-discipline are laudable but if you work digitally in any capacity, you’re Sisyphus, forver pushing the the boulder up that hill until the next attention-grabbing fad pollutes your feed.
Yet, underneath the dopamine-craving receptors that get set off like pachenko by short-form content lies a natural disposition within all of us for connection and engagement with others.
Anybody who has generated new ideas with others, whether written, audio-visual, performative or technologically innovative, knows that immersion and collaboration are infinitely more satisfying than solitary distractions.
I make a point of interacting consciously with no less than 50% of the content I now consume, not by liking or applauding on various apps but by instigating a new dialogue, a personal response, a clarification of an unfamiliar concept.
I know now that if I’m not doing this then I’m overloading my brain with reams of non-actionable data that short-circuits my ability to think critically and slowly rots my brain.
Knowing that you have to interact in some way with what we’re about to read or view will make you more intentional about what you choose to consume as well.
It’s the equivalent of picking up junk food in the supermarket and stopping in the aisle for a moment to ask yourself “what will this do FOR me and is is it worth my engaging with it?”
As a bonus, interaction stimulates new ideas of your own, tangential thinking and . We generate better ideas when we collaborate with others by skill stacking, compounding experiences
2. Evict the logical thinker who rents out the prime real estate of your mind for free
We’ve all experienced the nagging voice inside of us of the supercilious squatter who came to tea once and would never leave.
Their seemingly reasonable rationality gaslights us into feeling infantilised by our natural intuition.
Yet, our ability to make valid choices in our lives, whether creatively or professionally requires that our gut feelings a seat at the table too.
Our natural intuition to pursue certain goals and make critical decisions in our life that go against the grain is not just an emotional reaction but a deeply prescient one.
Often if we listen carefully to our sub-conscious we make decisions, seemingly on a hunch or a whim that go on to pay dividends and shape our lives for the better.
In fact, it was never just a hunch….Everything we have experienced from birth up to this point is still circulating in our brain somewhere, even if we can’t actively recall it and it informs the decisions that we make with our best interests firmly rooted in mind .
Any time we go against our intuition, whether by following a ‘logical’ example or worse, the herd mentality, we are denying out anthropological evolution to learn from our personal experiences to predict, safeguard and optimize our future.
3. Find the wanderlust in the mundane
When older people say that young people lack grit, what they really mean is that we are flighty.
They often don’t mean that millennials and Gen Z lack drive, passion, motivation — but instead that we have too many options available — afforded to us by a lifestyle that we have inherited.
The ability to throw it all in for a madcap adventure is no longer the preserve of renegade eccentrics and black sheep — it’s been standardised by the culture of wanderlust that is ubiquitous on social media.
The cause of this rabbit-hole escapism that leads people into the passive consumption of lifestyle content and starry-eyed scrolling is the absence of wide-eyed awe in the here and now.
Instead of looking for a quick fix to your burnt-out receptors, you just need to unplug, tune in and drop out to the bizarre happenstance that is your existence on this planet.
Sticking the course, and riding out the mundane process to improve your lot 20% over time, in a sustainable way, rather than a quick 40% spree that fizzles out is the new path of the outliers.
This brings me to my next point.
4. Use self-improvement as your compass, not your destination
Self-improvement is not the end goal that the internet believes it to be- it is just one of many means to an end.
That end goal is to get you out of whichever hole you’re stuck in and find yourself something that brings you to life about which you can get endlessly excited.
The “provide value” mantra of self-improvement creator-gurus worked because in the absence of a burning passion or never-ending curiosity, “providing value” it gave people the feeling of purpose that could then be claimed as their passion.
“My passion is helping people”
…yeah right, you and everyone else on the planet.
The thing that really helps people is seeing someone whose so tapped in to whatever weird curiosity, obscure skill or creative endeavour it is they’re doing that it brings you back to life and motivates you to find your own and double down on it.
If you’ve gone out on a quest and believe that self-improvement is your one true purpose then you need to keep digging- because its what you do after that — when the entitlement and expectation has faded that will direct where you future energies can be channeled in a sustainable way.
5. Create work that is driven by your curiosities, not by the algorithm.
We’ve arrived; online content has reached peak derivation. It’s a sea of repetitiveness.
In the age of print media, subliminal advertising was more overt — anyone with a shred of self-awareness could tell they were being proffered to.
Now the algorthithm gradually encroaches in on us over time and we stop being aware that our entire digital existence is but a fraction of what is really out there.
When you are inspired by something organically, as you saunter down the street merrily whistling to yourself, you have landed upon your innate curiosity.
Stop right there and then in that moment and right it down — because if it struck you out of the blue as being noteworthy it will likely resonate with someone else who has been stuck in the Scylla and Charybdis of algorithmic drivel.
6. Sacrifice your obsessive perfectionism at the alter of other peoples expectations
Have you heard the one about the photography teacher who split the class in two; one group were told to produce a photo every day, the other were told to produce just one photograph for the end of the term.
Guess whose final piece was better?
Agitating and prostrating about a piece of work that doesn’t yet fit your lofty standards is causing more detriment to your progress than anything else you’re doing right now.
This is not to say that you should throw content into the ether at will and hope it sticks…
Rather, to see each publication, video, article, art work, song or any other creative endeavour as a sounding board for where you are and where you hope to go next.
Feedback is critical to your development and there’s not feedback if theres nothing to show.
7. Don’t let your vocation consume you life
I told you at the start — passion and perseverance is not enough to take you over the finish line. You may be more enthusiastic than anyone you know about your ‘thing’ but you’re not working on a factory line.
Our intuition, associative thinking and creativity serve us best when we step back, zoom out and let the ideas and lessons of the day wash over us.
They need space without being smothered to dance around in our sub-conscious and evolve from a hatchling into whatever manifestation they may become.
Freddie Kift
I write about language, communication, flow, collaboration and technology.
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