Decouple studying from discovery. When you attempt to come up with a new idea, this requires you to be in a state that is different from that of acquiring information or learning. You sit down and think about something to talk about. This is the best way, as opposed to finding something new while you’re learning. You go and read a book, or watch a video for example, hoping that an idea gets generated in your head while you’re going through the material you’re currently consuming. That holds you a lot from exploring the new information or learning material that you’re going through at full speed. Also this makes you take too long and run out of energy before you come up with an idea that you can discuss or expand upon in your new piece of content. By the time you find the new idea you’ll be already too tired or bored to start the creative process of making your next piece of content. The best way is to detach the creative process from the learning process. Make each of the two processes take place separately, and not in the same session. Of course if you’re reading in a book and suddenly inspiration hits you and you feel you’ve got a lot to talk about, that is totally okay, and you shouldn’t suppress that. Act upon that immediately. Go create something right away. But you did not go initially with the intention of checking out stuff to find something new to talk about. You went to explore and learn, and you found something worthy of being put in a new piece of content as a byproduct or along the way. On no occasion should you resist such impulses. This is what the entirety of being a creative writer is all about. Writing because you got an impulse to write something down as it is and expose the rest of the world to it to the best of your ability. Each of the two processes, the learning one, and the creative one, should not be dependent upon the other. When you’re studying something you stay fully occupied with the learning or studying process exclusively. When you’re looking for an idea, or when you’re trying to discover something new to create a new piece of content about, dive right away into the creative process and start thinking immediately until you come up with something to make a new piece of content about.

You may notice that I told you elsewhere that if you can’t find something to talk about in your next piece of content that you should go read in books, watch videos, or listen to podcast episodes until you find something that you can talk about. This is in case of you failing to come up with a new idea or topic on your own through thinking or imagination only. If that happens, you go explore material made by other people until you come across something that you might pick as the topic that you’ll be discussing in your new piece of content. The new distinction here is that this is supposed to take place as part of the creative process, not during the learning process. The new thing here is that you isolate pure learning sessions from sessions where you intend to end up creating something new. For example, now you’re listening to a podcast episode to learn something new. That is what you have in mind. If you reserve learning as a source of coming up with new ideas only, you will not be able to learn unless you go with the intention of seeking to find any idea or a topic that you can talk about in your next piece of content.

So you go try to create something. If you can’t, then you explore content made by others until you find an idea or topic to talk about. The new distinction here is that it’s okay to sometimes go listen, watch, or read something made by somebody else with the sole intention of just learning or exploring what’s out there, without necessarily coming up with something that could help you in creating something new.