Over the years, I have built a voracious appetite to consume books, articles, blogs, videos, and off late, podcasts & audio books. Consuming has always been easy for me but creation (writing in my case) has not. My father has been trying to persuade me to write for a while but the point he had been trying to make especially hit home as I read, Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Tiago discusses the purpose of all this consumption and he makes a compelling case to create consciously, instead of just consuming passively.
I had always thought of my consumption as a means to satisfy my curiosities and to expand my understanding of the world. I never thought about it as something I did to confirm what I already knew or what I had inferred or deduced on my own. For me consumption had never been a quest to find external validation for what I knew to be true, but if I had to objectively look at the content that resonated with me the most, it was usually things that verbalised things that I had already thought of but never put down.
I have relied on conversations, with myself and others, and reading/watching/listening again to improve my understanding of a particular topic. Part of the reason conversations stuck with me is that writing is difficult. Every time I have tried to write in the past, I have learned the hard way that knowing about something is very different from being able to write about it.
I want to change that about myself in 2025.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear introduces the idea of changing one's identity to make a lasting change. In How to Write Like a Writer?, Thomas C. Forester opines that many people don't end up learning how to write, because one is forced to learn the rules before you start writing, it is presented as something that is not fun, and lastly, we don't treat it as a skill, ie one improves with practice. I found it to be true in my experience.