Entertainment vs. Education

I watch a lot of YouTube every day. Most of what I consume is educational content on business, marketing, and philosophy. Ideally, I like to consume long-form content, interviews, or long-form podcasts. I also listen to a lot of non-fiction audiobooks.

Consuming long-form self-education content has a few great advantages:

• It increases your attention span.
• It inspires and educates you to improve your life.
• It doesn’t feel like a waste of time, unlike entertainment content.

Entertainment is good in moderation. Additionally, once entertainment transforms into art, it may also carry valuable life lessons.

However, for the most part, I think it’s a great idea to swap entertainment for educational content as much as possible.

The paradox of this is that as you consume more self-improvement content, you'll ironically find a lot of people saying how consuming without taking action is useless, but I disagree.

Action will always beat learning, but learning is better than wasting time.

People often distinguish between consuming content and taking action. However, content is a spectrum that can vary from useless to useful. If you've been using entertainment as a way of escaping, the first stage is to reduce the amount of time you spend on useless content and move towards useful content, which will then lead you to taking action.

You can definitely take action without guidance, but if you get easily discouraged by continuous failure, the right guidance can prevent frustration, which might be the difference between persisting and giving up.

So, if you hear people saying that learning is useless unless you are taking action, remember that it’s a spectrum, and consuming useful content is way better than time-wasting content.

Even if you are not implementing every piece of advice in real time, you are still incorporating good ideas into your brain. This will give you greater access to the information available to you as you begin to take action more consistently.

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