Input, conversion, output

Everything moves through three stages: input, conversion, output. You take something in, you do something with it, something comes out. Skip the middle and you're just consuming.

So I started asking a blunt question: am I getting mentally fat? Book after book, video after video, ingested and never exercised. Input that never gets converted into output is just weight you carry—the point was never to collect the knowledge, it was to move it.