Original Post: https://dreamdimension.net/blog/2025/04/23/output-only-no-input/
Original post TLDR: try to only output things without looking anything up, not even the definition of a word. no inputs/consumption. no studying or pulling up references. just raw creation & meditation.
So after doing this for about a week. I am still adjusting but see some positives already & also some negatives.
I often need to pull up references or look things up to be sure I am not getting anything “wrong”. A sort of insidious habit that can disguise itself as helpful but is just another blocker to creating.
After doing a few days of this no input, only output. Just creating based on instinct and what I myself thought was “right”: mistakes-galore here we come.
I was able to instead of trying to look everything up (to be closer to “perfection/the-right-way”), I more or less just went with my gut.
And sometimes, though admittedly not always, I found concepts I thought I did NOT remember, but if I waited & i thought a bit harder, I kinda DID remember. kinda like dusting off old books that were stored way in the back, almost completely forgotten. The rest I more or less made up as I went along. what would i formulate for myself if there was no answers in the book?
Trusting in myself that I already “knew enough”, that I had so much within that I was in some odd way suppressing was my thesis going in.
What does it really mean to “know something” anyhow?
At times it was quite difficult and I was weak and did ease up some of my rules. I allowed myself to read on a long airplane ride, check my email daily to keep it clean (but my emails has luckily mostly already been reduced to mostly essentials), briefly communicate with loved ones, and look at comments/stats of my past post(s).
i think reading books (especially high quality ones) is a good balance, but perhaps limiting to just one or two books for x days would be wiser & provide a happier balance. i still need to experiment more. one positive side effect is that for me personally it lessens my inhibition to create & share what i’ve made. still not 100% but much better than before. even if i’m just mostly dumping “trash” i prefer this to my past method of just wishing one day I would do X or Y. there were many ramblings and recurring themes that kept popping into my crazy hectic mind but one i forgot over and and over again and have to still remind myself of: i’m not that important anyway, most of what i create doesn’t matter. and yet it does to me so that’s reason enough. perfection is an illusion.
even though like probably most of us, i detest the sound of my own voice, i really have started to get over it and even enjoy listening to my own ramblings. creating almost like a feedback loop that normally would only happen in my own mind but now I can go a little bit deeper. my main “output” has oddly been voice recordings. never woulda guess this would be the case.
however, part of me is somewhat doubtful this is healthy long term. listening to your own voice over & over again might be the definition of madness. mental health is a concern especially since the nature of long-term solo travel is already a bit isolating. but part of me knows something was missing from my past “routine”. maybe I will keep playing around with periods of doing this and taking a break and repeating the cycle.
one weird annoyance i am still struggling with is how to “dump” all this stuff out to the internet in a more streamlined manner so i can feel a bit of relief in just getting it out there. for the most part i’ve been relying on youtube and wordpress on my site. i guess part of me still feels some of my stuff Is “cluttering” the rest (namely one off images, short music loops, etc) , but perhaps that is a limiting belief of it’s own that I need to break free from.
Finally, the biggest lesson and take away I had is the following important life-changing revelation:
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