The habit I'll never stop
I've always been a couch potato. And it was bad news for my mental and physical health for a long long time.
Lucky for me, in the past couple years, I've been able to add moving, strength training and a proper diet to my daily life.
I can see in real time how much this has helped me have my dream physique while still being able to keep this lazy habit of mine. 😈
Special shoutout to my coach Nat from Go Inside Fitness.
In 2024, I watched around 200 movies, and I'll attach a photo to prove that.
For those that don't know what this app is, it's the biggest social platform for movie lovers.
I love logging what I watch and finding more things to watch. And the community is amazing.
These were my stats last year and for people like me, it seems normal but most of you will think I'm a weirdo haha.
I think normal people watch about one movie a month, or something like that. But I'll tell you why this habit has made me a content and creative machine.
have your brain "working" even when you're not
Watching a tv episode or a movie every day (excessive) saved my creativity as an adult.
It's not a new thing to know that we are most creative when we are younger.
We are constantly learning and trying stuff when we are children.
Our curiosity is pure and genuine in those years. But as we grow, and life starts happening to us, things change.
We experience the death of a loved one. We fail at a couple of things we wanted to win at so bad, and then we start to coil up and hide when we realize the world isn't all rainbows and sunshine.
And one thing that gets lost at this point is our creativity.
The best ideas always come when we're not at our desks.
And one of the most effective ways to allow your brain to make connections to things you know is to allow your brain to suspend real life for a bit.
This is what fiction allows us to do. When I watch a movie, for those 2 hours, nothing else really matters except the story in my line of sight.
The characters, their lives, their stories. It all works together in our brains and causes us to remember certain things from our past, learn new things and make connections to our real life work.
Another important note, animation isn't for kids. In fact, the best stories ever told were told through animated characters.
I've learned very key lessons in life from animation. I believe that you're limiting yourself from elevating in certain regards.
If you're helping people do something that actually matters, you cannot afford to stagnate.
You have to continuously improve and evolve. You have to reverse, sounding the same all the time by continuously pushing into the unknown. And fiction helps you do that.
a bad content diet will make you fat - and sluggish
I'm side-eyeing self-help books.
I won't come here and pretend like I haven't read some over the years.
In fact, some of the key things I know about marketing and branding all came from non-fiction reading and workshops. It's a very important part of learning a skill.
They teach you a lot of principles that you would have never known.
But it is so easy to get into the habit of reading stuff like that and thinking that's making you a productive person or worse - a better person.
Melinda Livsey brought this to light for me for the first time in a podcast I can't quite remember.
If you're someone struggling to take action on all the things you've learned in university or through self-help books and courses, you're probably content fat.
You've consumed so much framework, theory, concepts, case studies that now, you are struggling to move and take action on the things you want to do.
And the truth is, you're more likely to become content fat from consuming self-help as opposed to consuming fiction.
There's a healthy balance you have to make and if self-help is something you want to add to your diet, you have to have a huge bias towards taking action.
If you're learning about public speaking and getting better controlling your voice, start a podcast so you can bring the frameworks to life.
If you're learning about content creation and brand strategy, start making your own.
Coupling that with explosive consumption of fiction, and watch how your ideas never slow down.
You'll be constantly inspired and become a light that people will want to draw themselves closer to.
Fix your diet.