“Create more than you consume” and “Strategic Imbalance” for Academic Writing?
As you may know, I like watching what’s happening in the personal development sphere and wondering how that might apply to my life in academia. One idea I currently keep seeing in the self-help or personal development space (especially on YouTube) is that people want to “go analog” again, framing it as a kind of new luxury (see my digital minimalism experiment from years ago). Closely related is the advice that, if you want to level up your life, you should try to create more than you consume. And I was wondering whether or how that might apply to academia.
“Create more than you consume” vs. Steal Like an Artist
On the one hand, yes, at the core of this advice is spending less time consuming low-quality content and that’s always a good idea. But at the same time, producing meaningful work—whether that’s art or academic writing—depends on consuming a lot of material (e.g. Steal Like an Artist). You can only really say anything new once you’ve engaged deeply with what’s already out there. That said, I do notice that in areas I’m already familiar with, where I’ve put in a lot of work, I can now create new content without constantly consuming more. And sometimes it’s necessary to let ideas flow more freely; otherwise I end up relying too heavily on the literature. Still, many new ideas do ultimately come from consuming content in one way or another. So I’m not sure I fully agree with the advice as it’s often presented, but to some extent it still feels like a good principle, especially if “consumption” refers to low-value input (as in on social media) and “creation” to more meaningful output.
Embracing Strategic Imbalance
This connects to another principle I’ve come across, for example in some recent videos by Ali Abdaal, the author of Feel-Good Productivity (2023). He often talks about being asked how to get rich and emphasizes that, when he was building his business, his life was not balanced. He calls this “strategic imbalance.” Now he has more balance, but that only came later.
I’ve been struggling with something related. I’ve realized that I’ve been expecting myself to be highly productive not just in my career but also in my hobbies, while also maintaining a full private life. And while I do think I have a fulfilling private life, the idea that work-life balance should be something like a strict 50-50 split just doesn’t seem realistic. It might be more useful to focus on high-value priorities instead.
Part of the issue is that many of my “maintenance” routines are already quite demanding and are things that, for other people, might already count as hobbies. On top of that, I’ve expected myself to pursue skill-based hobbies at a high level. For example, I haven’t been playing the guitar much lately, although I have been practicing singing. But realistically, I can’t simultaneously practice guitar, develop my singing, and push my career forward at full speed. Moving to Berlin last year was a deliberate decision to prioritize my career, and I think I need to accept what that implies.
So I’m starting to embrace this idea of strategic imbalance. I have begun to let go of certain implicit expectations, like the idea that I should be consistently improving my language skills because language learning used to be one of my favourite hobbies, you could even say my personality growing up and I’m quite sad I’m losing all my skills and have basically no time to invest in this area of my life anymore. In reality, I haven’t been very effective at that for years, basically since my PhD. I’ve done a bit, which is better than nothing, and I have built a solid foundation with some of what I have been learning. For instance, I can understand quite a lot in Portuguese, even audiobooks, but I struggle to actually speak. Part of my issue is that most available content is Brazilian Portuguese, which is easier, whereas I’m more interested in continental Portuguese. So I can’t really use the language in the context I care about. Yet I now realized that if I wanted to make real progress, I would need to invest heavily for a period of time, and then I’d probably experience what looks like a sudden breakthrough, because the foundation is already there. But right now just isn’t the time for that. At the moment, I can only engage with it incrementally, and I’m trying to release myself from the expectation of making rapid progress (whether in languages or in other skill-based hobbies) at the same time as pushing my career.
Instead, I’ve been writing a lot. I had hoped to blog more, and I do blog occasionally (obviously), but doing significantly more just doesn’t seem feasible. I’m already producing a large amount of content in the form of articles, and in some cases (especially with material intended for the LaTeX Ninja blog), I find that ideas I initially consider for blog posts develop into something more substantial, better suited for an article. At this point, I don’t want to “give away” such material in a blog post anymore. That does make it harder to find topics to blog about, which is a bit frustrating. But if something can become a stronger piece of work, it makes sense to prioritize that.
So, at the moment, this phase of my career is about committing fully and strategically accepting a certain imbalance in my life. About creating more than I consume (although I’m not fully sure that’s really what I’m doing yet, still I like the idea).
These are just a few reflections for today. I hope they’re useful to some of you. It’s actually quite hard to tell—there’s very little interaction or feedback, so I don’t really know if anyone is reading or finding this valuable. But in any case, these are my thoughts on how current personal development ideas might be adapted to fit the realities of academic life.
Thanks for all the fish,
Best,
S
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Lang (April 5, 2026). “Create more than you consume” and “Strategic Imbalance” for Academic Writing? Epigrammetry. Retrieved April 17, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/160mm
