I went through a nearly identical phase as the author. Obsessive reading, hours in the library, ordering everything related to business, becoming a Kaiser & Blair rep when I was 17. A blur of success and failure.

But always moving forward.

After thinking about it plenty, I think it boils down to this: some folks just weren't born with the fire. Often, this fire looks a lot like insanity.

Your a genius if you succeed, and an idiot if you don't.

I play with fire because it makes me feel good, plain and simple. I hack because I love it. I sell my own software because I love marketing, too.

And everyday, I'm confident that if I give folks enough value, in one way or another, they will give me enough money to eat. And my devious little plan hasn't failed me yet!

I find irony in "your a genius."

False dichotomy. Interesting, anyway.

This article makes me smile because I am a Hacker News groupie.

People can passionately follow art or music or movies and no one thinks them odd for not producing some of the same- that's how I feel about programming. I just like following it, especially the underlying philosophies. I'm an armchair hacker- oh, I've put a few things together in my day but they're the programming equivalent of Harry/Draco slash.

I guess this means Y Combinator's Hacker News has an official fangirl ;)

A good kick in the ass.

I'm both a consumer and creator.

I consume large quantities of non-fiction, but would prefer to write fiction.

I'd rather create video games than play them.

I don't think consuming and creating are mutually exclusive.

Haha I feel like him, except I had ebay when I was 13 (I'm 18 now) -- what a difference time makes!

I want to point out that most producers also consume a lot. But it's not necessary true the other way around.

There's also a difference between mindless consumption and focused consumption. People who produce a lot do the latter.

Ouch. Time for me to get a move on. Time's a-wasting!

In my favor, my stick-it-in-your-ear conversation takes place tomorrow. It's on the docket and everything! :)

Previously on the idea of "consumer" vs "producer" roles:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164014

A lot of that is fluff, but the basic premise was that the Internet could probably be built more effectively with some sort of built-in gauge to determine the actuality of a person's "productivity" versus their "consumability."

This is the old giver/taker argument.

IMHO the interesting part is even though both are highly related you need extra parts of the brain for the former. For example reading vs. writing. This pattern tends to repeat from reading about fMRI studies (completely reader there myself, not my science.)

I find [pure] takers to be incomplete and get close to be social parasites, even if harmless.

If you stop reading in the middle of his blog post, does that answer the question?

I think time has come for me to read less and do more.

I won't be the first to say here that producing and consuming, as this post uses the terms, are not mutually exclusive (and are probably orthogonal.) But I believe we choose how much of each we are.

Now I need to prove this to myself. By my recent activity, I am a great consumer and not much of a producer.

Huh, that's me. Time to code, I guess.

Everyone wants to be a producer. The author intends to incite people into taking action and becoming producers, not stagnating as a consumer.

Take. Action.

I agree with the general spirit here, but the fact is that most of us vacillate between producer and consumer roles, and fill both to varying degrees.

The perverse irony of modern society is that it's orders of magnitude easier to be a consumer than a producer. I don't mean that producing requires more psychological investment and effort; that's a given, in any case. I mean that society makes it much easier to fill the role of the consumer than the producer. You can consume cheaply and easily, as if the world is begging people to consume.

Producing, in any meaningful, useful, and psychologically sustainable context, is very difficult. Most people don't get to do it. At the very least, you need an audience. Realistically, you also need people to pay you to produce, which means that your odds of getting meaningful work are long (unless you're the only one skilled enough to do the interesting work, the people with the money take the meaningful projects and throw you the scraps). Consequently, 85 percent of people cannot attain work that is more valuable or interesting than watching TV. This is why we're a nation of non-producing consumers.

The kind of consuming he's talking about here, the continuous soaking up of information, news, current events, on subjects that interest you, is something I'm pretty familiar with personally, and I can tell you that it can be a cognitive drain that actually reduces your desire to produce. And news is addictive; it's easier than producing something new, and, at least to me, seems to hit the reward receptors in the brain pretty hard.

This is one of the reasons I try to route all the streams of news I keep up with through a single RSS reader; this helps enforce limits on how often I can go back for another hit.

You've hit on one of the major reasons why the Internet is worse than TV, as far as time-wasters go. TV gets old after a while and is unfulfilling. The Internet devises new ways of hitting new reward receptors every second, and the possibilities are infinite. Sick of reading? You can write. (Comments, blogs, Wikipedia).

I've often thought of Internet addiction as being more like an overeating problem than a drug problem. You can give up cigarettes or opiates cold turkey, but no one can stop eating. In order to be productive as a programmer, you must daily engage your vice.

Rob, have much of an ego there buddy?

I usually check to see how many comments there and if there are quite a few I can count on you guys to have a good discussion going and I can't help but check what's going on.