Hi Taylor,
This sounds similar to a pattern that reoccurs with me often; going through a period of taking in lots of new information and actively seeking ways to grow, only to reach a point where continuing to bring in new information wouldn't work! - the sponge would start leaking, not knowing what to do.
This happened for a long time, and even though it still happens to an extent, I've managed to deal with this issue and cut down the time where the sponge is too full, so that I can start filling it up again.
So, as simple and obvious as it may sound, once you feel that your sponge is full, I'd recommend taking a step back and ceasing to bring in information for an amount of time. (Depending on what you're learning, anywhere from a few weeks to around a month).
Think of it like a do-it-yourself dot-the-dot puzzle on a sheet of paper, where each new piece of information learned is a dot you put down on the paper. Now, after you've filled it up with a good amount of information, there is potential to form a deeper learning of this information, by connecting the dots and organizing it into a picture. But, if you continue to put more and more data on that sheet of paper, the task of sorting through it and making sense of the data becomes more and more difficult; harder for a pattern to emerge.
See, the paper has all these little bits and pieces but it doesn't quite know how to arrange them yet, and assimilate the information on a deeper, intuitive level.
This is why I'd recommend taking a break from bringing in more and more information for a few weeks when you feel full, and returning to information intake once you've sorted out the dots and made sense of the picture they form.
Along with that, however, a crucial step in making this work for me has been to get a large empty canvas (like one of those large sketch pads you can draw/paint on) and try to find the theme in the information I've got stored up by laying out everything and making little notes around the data points and drawing lines between them, trying to find connections. After going at this for a few weeks, intuitions start popping up, and the information generally becomes a lot more clear in the big picture, and something that I can truly understand from the details all the way up to the main idea behind it.
Anatman had an article during his 'Genuine Man' series,
https://www.girlschase.com/content/genui ... ective-man ,
that did a great job of advising people to take lots of action, but to pair it with introspection and figuring things out with it.
All action + no introspection = a guy with lots of experiences, who doesn't necessarily understand why things work or don't, and could shorten his learning curve significantly with some more thought. While...
All introspection + no action = a guy with a whole lot of theories and not much to show for them.
But when massive action is combined with deep introspection, you get a guy who not only has one hell of a busy, interesting dot-the-dot scatterplot, but a spectacular picture to go with it, because he's not only tried out his theories, but he has continued to refine them in the furnace of his introspective mind.
All that being said... I don't think you necessarily need to re-engineer your sponge to operate at a higher level, because it's already pretty damn incredible. Rather, I'd invite you to try out taking the occasional break from information intake, so that you can take the time to make sense of what you've discovered and have it make sense internally at a true level of understanding, rather than an information regurgitator.
Hope this helped man!
- Byron
