Mind, Body & Soul Series — Post 3
The drone was in its box for fourteen months.
I wrote about that recently. But the drone isn’t the problem. The
drone is just the most obvious version of a pattern that runs through
everything.
Because alongside the drone, I have:
A Domestika library of art courses I own outright. A Skillshare
subscription with more than I’ll ever watch. A Masterclass subscription.
A BBC Maestro subscription that includes a Julia Donaldson children’s
book workshop, an Andy Evanson watercolour series, and a Thomas Schaller
course I specifically remember wanting.
A shelf of art books — some with techniques I haven’t tried yet —
that I photographed the spines of specifically to catalogue for InkFox,
then didn’t revisit.
A GoPro with an active cloud subscription. Sitting next to the
drone.
A Zoe 30 mix on the kitchen counter that gets used approximately 40%
of the time.
And — the one that stings a little — about 300 hours of AI
development work and transcripts that sat in a folder for weeks before I
started doing something with them.
📦 The Buying Impulse
vs. The Using Impulse
Buying something feels productive. That’s the trap.
At the moment of purchase, the value is at its peak — the idea of
what you’ll do with it, the problem it’ll solve, the skill it’ll give
you. That feeling is real. It just isn’t the same as the thing actually
being used.
The gap between purchase and use is where the value leaks.
This isn’t a discipline failure. It’s a design failure. You bought
the thing without building the system that would make using it natural.
No trigger. No scheduled session. No first concrete output to aim at.
Just the item, and the intention, and the passing of time.
The drone needed a specific plan: first session, Wheal Coates,
morning light, document the setup. The Schaller watercolour course
needed a specific exercise: do module one this weekend and produce one
piece. The Zoe 30 needed to be next to the morning water glass, not in
the cupboard.
Systems, not willpower.
📚 The Library You’re Not
Using
There’s a version of this conversation that InkFox and I have had
directly.
The co-pilot knows what’s on my shelf. It can say: you’re working
on a problem with loose brushwork and you own a Schaller course that
addresses exactly this. Chapter four. Go watch 20 minutes of
it.
That’s not a service you get from a Domestika subscription sitting in
a browser tab. It’s what happens when the resource is integrated with
the context of what you’re currently doing. When someone — or something
— bridges the gap between the library and the moment of need.
Most people don’t have that bridge. So the library just grows, and
the use rate stays low, and the guilt compounds.
🔄 The Rule That Changes
Things
Before buying anything new: audit what you already own.
Not a vague mental check. An actual five-minute review. What do I
have in this area? Have I completed it? If not, why not — and does
buying this new thing actually solve that, or just layer more unfinished
material on top?
The uncomfortable answer is usually: you already own what you need.
You just haven’t used it.
This applies to art books, courses, subscriptions, tools, equipment,
and — if you’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for the past few months
— AI transcripts full of your own best thinking, sitting in a folder
waiting to be turned into something.
You own more than you think.
Use it before you buy more.
This connects directly to the drone post — if you haven’t read
it, start there: The Drone in the Box.
