Have you ever thought about how much time you spend consuming other peoples work? How much time you harvest the fruits of other peoples labor? When you read content on the internet, as you are doing at the moment, you are a consumer. When you watch the news, watch your favorite movie or some documentary, you are consuming other peoples work. This is of course totally normal – the content has been created for exactly that purpose, but are a lot of people becomming almost entirely consumers?

I have lately been thinking quite a lot about remembering the creator role. Thought a lot about paying back.

If we stay in internet-terms, then there are a great chance that you are a member of several “niche” forums. This could be a fitness forum, a hifi-forum, drinks or whatever. A lot of people gain knowledge on topics of their interest from other people. They browse forums and blogs in order to move them from one point to another, they make full use of all the good free content there is available to all of us.

The reason why there are all this good free content is because a lot of people have remembered to not only be consumers, but also pay back to their community(in whatever context), by being creators of new context, and by helping people that are in the same situation they once were.

It is easy to switch and be the creator, it is easy to pay back, it is easy to help. I am not trying to make everyone create things around the clock, and feel bad about consuming. All I try to do is make you once in a while say this to yourself:

 Have I only been consuming, or have I also created something today?

What you will find is that creating feels good! Helping others feels good and paying back is actually worth it. Keep sharing information!