What does it mean to be a producer rather than a consumer? At the most literal level, the answer seems almost trivially obvious: a producer makes things; a consumer uses things. A factory produces; a store makes the factory's output available for purchase. A novelist produces books; readers consume them. An engineer produces systems; users consume the systems' outputs. These distinctions are real and they matter, but they are not, in themselves, particularly illuminating for the purpose of thinking about how to build a professional life — because in the course of any ordinary day, almost everyone does both. We consume coffee in the morning and produce reports in the afternoon. We consume the professional output of colleagues and produce professional output of our own. We are, simultaneously and continuously, both producers and consumers in the literal sense.
The sentence is asking something else. It is asking about orientation — about which of the two postures is primary, about which one defines the habitual stance from which you approach the unallocated time and energy of your professional life.