Reasearch or Do?

I spend a lot of time trying to learn ‘how to do things’ rather than actually ‘doing things’. I have always been this way. I try to learn all of the basics about a subject. I research academically what to do to, but have always then neglected the implementation. We all know that the only way to learn many things, the only way to get better at them, is to actually do them. How many times have we all heard that the ‘only way to get better at writing is to write’. From what I have garnered the only two rules that really seem to really be important to improve your writing are ‘to write lots’ and ‘to read lots’. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I have found that I am spending less time on both of these activities and have spending more and more time on reading about writing. I suppose that reading about writing is still reading, but I view it as different. Whilst this no doubt has its place in educating a novice like myself I feel that I need to be careful. I need to be realistic about the fact that you cannot learn everything by reading about it, sometimes you just have to do it.

Often when I have an interest I subscribe to all of the related magazines that I can find, buy up every related book on Amazon and see what courses I can sign up to. Consequently I end up not having the time left to actually do what it is that interested me in the first place. I know that finding out all about an interest can be important, but ultimately you have to do it to, not just read about it. I suppose it is a case of needing to do rather than research.

I must be stronger. I will have to limit the time that I spend on this practice in the future and increase the time I actually spend pursuing the activity or interest of choice, in this case writing.

Do others ever encounter problems like this? Spending more time on reading about an interest than actually pursuing it. I would be very interested to find out.