Creating vs Consuming: Why You Should Aim for 50-50

This post is a follow-up to Illusion of Traditional Education, where I explored how our learning habits are shaped early on. Here, I extend those ideas into the corporate and entrepreneurial world, where the tension between creating and consuming is just as real-and maybe even more consequential.

Most of us spend far more time consuming than creating. Whether it's scrolling through social media, reading articles, or watching videos, it often feels like 90% of our time is spent taking in information, and only 10% (if that) is spent making something new.

But what if we aimed for a 50-50 split?

Why the Imbalance?

Creating is tough. It's time-consuming, sometimes frustrating, and always requires a leap of faith. Consuming, on the other hand, is easy and instantly rewarding. Even in the startup and corporate world, we see this: endless research, validation, and planning-often to avoid the pain of building something that might not work. We're taught to do things "the right way," which usually means more analysis and less action.

The Shift: Creation is Easier Than Ever

Here's the twist: the world has changed. Tools, platforms, and AI have made creation faster and more accessible than ever before. You can launch a product, write a blog, or share your art with the world in minutes. The cost of trying and failing is lower than ever.

The Startup & Corporate Parallel

In startups and large organizations alike, the old wisdom was to do all the work upfront-research, validate, plan-so you wouldn't waste time building the wrong thing. But now, with rapid prototyping and instant feedback, it's often better to create first, then iterate. Creation is no longer the bottleneck. The risk has shifted: over-planning can be more dangerous than building and learning quickly.

The New Era: Everyone Can Experiment

Previously, the cost of experimentation was high-building prototypes, running tests, and validating ideas required significant resources, time, and access. Now, with AI and modern tools, the barrier to experimentation has dropped dramatically. Anyone can build, test, and iterate on ideas quickly and affordably.

By nature, everyone will experiment. The question is: how do we harness this collective energy?

Crowdsourcing Experiments

Imagine a platform where builders from all backgrounds can propose and validate hypotheses together-a kind of crowdsourced innovation lab. Instead of siloed teams or closed accelerators, we could have a global network of creators running experiments in parallel, sharing results, and learning together.

Startup accelerators often have Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR) to drive new ventures. But maybe the next evolution is 'Entrepreneurs in the Wild' (EIW): independent builders, empowered by AI, collaborating and competing in open ecosystems to validate ideas at scale.

The future of creation is not just faster-it's more open, more distributed, and more collaborative than ever before.

What ties all of this together is the idea of high agency-the belief that you can take action, experiment, and shape outcomes, no matter your starting point. For more on cultivating this mindset, check out highagency.com.

A Call to Action

What would your work look like if you spent as much time creating as you do consuming? What could your team build, write, or share?

Try flipping the ratio. Start small: write a post, build a tiny app, launch a quick experiment. Creation is tough, but it's also where the magic happens-at any scale, in any setting.