Charlie Gilkey recommends splitting your days into 3 C’s: Consuming, Connecting & Creating. In theory you should be striving to do equal parts of each so that you can remain balanced and continue progressing. This makes perfect sense to me. If I spend too much time creating and not connecting, I feel burned out and disconnected (surprise, surprise). Lots of energy in connecting and not creating and I feel slightly unproductive. Lately, I’ve been spending ooodles of time in the consuming camp. This is hard for me to avoid because I am a born book worm. I have a voracious appetite for the written word. I usually stick to fiction or memoirs but lately I’ve been consuming a ton of non-fiction business-y books and a sh*t load of blogs. It’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming to take in all of this information about what I should be doing to build a business or how I should be living my life or the types of things I should be eliminating from my life. It’s getting to the point where reading all of these blogs and e-books and real books were making me feel unfulfilled with my own life. The life that I’ve worked very hard to create for myself. They were making me long for things that had never even crossed my mind. ‘It might be neat to become more minimalist’ I would think or ‘Maybe I should also be trying to climb the 7 summits.’ Why was I pining over things that are so not me?
Reading is wonderful because it opens your mind to things you never thought possible, it broadens your perspective and helps to shape your worldview. But reading other people’s blogs or books shouldn’t make you feel unhappy or unfulfilled or less than. If reading this blog makes you feel like a worse person, by all mean stop reading it. It’s funny, it seems that all of this talk about breaking out of the status quo has created a brand new status quo. Create the life you want, not the one someone tells you you should create. When it comes down to it, we need to stop believing that living our lives one particular way will make us happier or more legitimate. For some of us the whole steady job, 2.5 kids and a house with a picket fence is pretty ideal. Some of us long to travel the world with minimal possessions. I’m willing to bet that most of us fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. And that’s perfectly fine. I don’t believe any which way is the right way. What I do firmly believe is that all of you have a right way for you and that is what you must chase down with gusto.
Consuming is great but we must also be wary of what we’re consuming and how it’s making us feel. Is reading a million and one blogs every week inspiring you to take action? Or is it making you feel like a dolt? Are you learning anything new or are you reading the same ‘ol thing over again? I will definitely be cutting down on the amount of non-fiction consuming I do for the time being and I’m learning to be much more choosy about the things I consume. Besides, I miss my old friend, Fiction and her cousin Memoir. They’ve always been lovely to me.
Have you ever gotten stuck in one of the 3 C’s? What did you do to re-balance yourself?
