Mistake #5: Overconsuming
There’s a 90-9-1 rule of participation in social media.
90% of users are lurkers – they read or observe, but don’t contribute.
9% of users contribute from time to time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most of the contributions.
The rule describes how most users don’t participate very much in online communities. Often, they simply lurk in the background.
I’ll bet this same rule applies to our day to day lives. When it comes to its impact on us as parents and on our children, however, I believe it would be in our best intertest to flip these numbers around.
Most of us spend way too much time consuming and very little time participating and contributing.
We want our kids to get off their devices, but our faces are glued to the screen just as much, if not more.
We act like uber drivers shuttling our kids to this activity and that, but push aside our own passions and dreams.
We forget that we used to read and write and dance and run and make art and sing and play sports and make music.
We were creators, but now we scroll a rectangle or stare at a box watching other people with more interesting lives than ours.
Our kids are watching.
They see us pushing aside our dreams to pursue theirs, and they are filing it away and learning to do the same one day.
If we want them to reach for the stars and fly, they have to see us do that, too.
Creators do the work and let others grade the outcome.
Consumers grade the outcome and let others do the work.
James Clear
What if we created much more than we consumed?
How would our lives be different?
How would this impact our children’s lives?
