it genuinely surprises me how popular and intuitive this "create more than you consume" meme is
The article says Spending hours watching cooking shows won’t make you a better cook—cooking will. I disagree - there has to be some kind of give and take. You don't want to isolate yourself and try to reinvent the wheel in terms of cooking. On the other hand, you can consume cooking media, or food, for entertainment or for entertainment and to learn/get new ideas.
To put it another way, I'm not going to just figure out PowerShell if you give me an ISE and a few weeks. Give me an ISE a few weeks, stack exchange, Microsoft documentation, etc. and I will.
You should spend more time doing the thing than you spend watching videos about the thing. Or at least do the thing regularly. Doesn't mean videos can't help, but I'm pretty sure they feel like they help a lot more than they actually do.
There's definitely a balance, and as you identify I think the point is to target the extreme that will spend hundreds of hours on cooking videos and no time actually coooking for themselves. At that point it's consumption for consumptions sake than as a means to progress oneself.
But sure, you need to consume to learn as well. No one should go into a terminal and expect to just know all the hundreds of built-in commands (let alone package managers to grab millions more). A manual traditionally doesn't help identify what commands are needed to start gaining proficiency either. That's what courses/tutorials excel in, to make you better at reading those man pages later on after practice with some fundamentals.
Probably about 75% of everything I create, I create for myself. Nobody else is ever likely to see any of it. The act of creating is its own reward (being able to have and use the thing is a reward as well, of course), and I've found that sharing my creations comes with an inherent cost in terms of time: answering questions, support, or even just people wanting to talk about the thing.
Also, the level of polish I need to put into a thing in order to feel OK about sharing it will easily double the amount of time it will take to create it.
It gets expensive. As a result, I only share those things that I deem important to share.
So I guess it depends on what you mean by “create” and “consume,” and how you measure them.
That's surfing / grazing.
You'd be surprised. It's a common cliche in musician interviews for example that they don't listen to other music for large stretches of time.
Authors do read more than the average person, but the average person wouldn't read to save their life (the average american reads like 1 book per year according to stats I've seen)
Imagine an author told you they had written more words than they had ever read? You’d think them mad.