Frankly speaking, I believe that everyone feels everyday’s battle inside — a battle between the role of a Creator and a Consumer.
Even the same time I am writing this article, I am struggling with actual writing the article and drinking another cup of coffee or opening YouTube to loose myself in a half an hour watching funny videos.
No doubt, you are not able to play only one role. We all have a mix of both roles all the time. However, there is probably a disproportion between Creator/Consumer role. I assume, most of the time we are consumers due to our nature to extract and use the information around us for our purposes. A human brain is trained to find any patterns inside the information as a neural network (as is actually is), even if there is no pattern at all.
As for me, I always think about some side project, self-improvements, creating new ideas because I believe that life of the Consumer is not what I was born to.
To help fighting with my procrastination, I created a personal Trello board which always reminds me that I still have a lot of things to do and it really encourages me to keep progressing and trying to create something new, even if it is just a pet-project just to learn some new technology and playing around with it.
As you can see, I am not so good at keeping it updated, trying to implement everything that I found a probably good idea to try to. I have an excuse (which actually should not be an excuse for it) that I have a family, a house, a car and people whom I want to spend time with. However, I am pretty sure that I should spend more time in the Creator’s role than I manage to use it right now.
I am a Senior Developer/Engineer with tons of experience and I want it to be utilised in a more proper way. Slowly, but I am progressing in being up to date with new technologies, methodologies and just doing some pet-projects as well. That is why I created a personal GitHub account and adding more and more projects there. I started with nothing and now I have some projects trying to solve some problems as well as helping me to play around new technologies and make some experiments.
Well, it is impossible to have a world which contains only Creators because the core of an economy are Consumers. Furthermore, Creators are finding new ways of solving people’s (read Consumer’s) problems or even create new ones. Without people who consume that solutions they will have nothing to do.
Overall, I am not trying to make you drop everything and start creating something new immediately and desperately. No. Being a Creator means not only inventing new technologies, products and solutions but also do improvements and grow. Being only a Consumer for everyone could lead to stagnation and even degradation of the humankind. I believe that we are (humankind) deserve a much better life with much more possibilities. Is this not a such a great motivation to do it?!
In the nutshell, if you keen to live in a better world you should keep trying to spend more time in a Creator’s position, spend time improving yourself, be doing self-education, thinking out of the box, and I believe that after that we will find ourselves in a new World.
