Obsession gets a bad rap. of course, obsessions with people, or with irrational beliefs such as those held by
OCD sufferers, can be unhealthy or even dangerous. We are lobbying for something quite different: productive obsessing, or putting yourself wholeheartedly into a useful and meaningful passion. These healthy preoccupations are an antidote to boredom and passivity. They aren't just for people driven to accomplish something out of the ordinary. They are for everyone. We firmly believe that doing things by half—merely dabbling in a hobby or professional endeavor—produces sad human beings. It's dangerous to feel as though you aren't making a meaningful contribution. We don't want you to look at yourself in the mirror and see a person who might have done this but didn't, or who loves that but, for some odd reason, takes no active interest in it. In order to lead a life that makes you proud, you likely need to up the ante and get obsessed. Sure, you might experience fatigue and frustration at times, but you'll be able to deal with those side effects because you'll be immersed in something stimulating and important.
Some people know what their productive obsession would be—they just haven't committed themselves to it yet. Others have vague interests but don't really know where to begin, even if they like the idea of delving deep into a project. The productive obsession you decide to cultivate should be rooted in love, interest, and a desire to better our shared circumstances here in the world. Think big!
Say, for example, that you produce one-of-a-kind water jars but it's been your secret ambition to tackle a large ecological art project. If the sale of your water jars pays the rent, they probably regularly push the eco-art project right out of your mind and off the table. That's often how ambitious plans get lost or even vanish. A good way to start is to dedicate yourself to a productive obsession for a month. In this case, you would choose the eco-art project, even at the risk of a temporary income dip.
When you obsess, you learn how to extinguish distractions so that you can concentrate. You accept the hard existential fact that if you intend to matter you must act as if you matter. You retrain your brain, asking it to halt its pursuit of fluff and worry, to instead embrace its own potential. In addition, you announce that you prefer grand pursuits to ordinary ones; you stand in solidarity with other members of your species who have opted for big thinking and big doing. And you turn yourself over—even to the point of threat and exhaustion—to your own loves and interests.
Cultivating a productive obsession involves going on a long journey, with dips and peaks in motivation. Knowing whether you should stick with something or switch gears is more an art than a science, and external markers of success are not the only way to measure how your project is coming along. Still, if you are truly spinning your wheels, with no growth in your own abilities or in the world's interest in your output, it's time to regroup. Being obsessed with a brilliant screenplay idea for 40 years without ever turning it into an actual film is not productive. While you are defending yourself with your fantasy of making your dream movie, your brain is held captive.
A productive obsession provokes all sorts of mental states—euphoria when something goes brilliantly, irritation when you feel thwarted, fatigue after hours of mental struggle, excitement as one idea leads to another. You can prepare for these states and decide beforehand how you will handle them. Have you grown a little too agitated? (A hot shower works wonders.) Keep inventing new coping strategies and remember the ones that have proven effective in the past.
Much of the difficulty in pursuing a productive obsession resides in switching gears between your normal life and your obsessive life. You'll need to learn how to toggle effortlessly, so that, for instance, no time is wasted and no internal drama created as you leave your day job and turn to your symphony. Imagine that you have—or are—a flawless transmission system, whisper-quiet and beautifully constructed, one that allows you to move efficiently through the day, revving up to obsess and revving down to peel potatoes.
Each of us has that do-nothing, watch-a-little-more-television place in our hearts and that harder-to-engage work-well-and-think-intensely place. The life of your productive obsession depends on your constant recommitment, which sounds like "I am doing this, damn it!" Your mind may prefer its habitual ways and opt for fear, fantasy, worry, regret, or idleness. The instant your mind produces one of its stories about why you ought to abandon your productive obsession—because you can't succeed, because a storm is coming—shout, "No!"
Embark on a month of productive obsessing, then another, and, ultimately, a lifetime. If you end up with a ballet like Swan Lake, a business like Apple, or a new theory of relativity, congratulations. But congratulate yourself just as much if what you end up with is a stream of brainstorms in the service of a fulfilling life. —Eric Maisel, Ph.D. and Ann Maisel
Rebecca Skloot : Story Wrangling and Writing
As a 16-year-old, Rebecca Skloot spent hours each week in the waiting room of the hospital where her father, who had contracted a virus that caused him serious brain damage, was receiving experimental treatments. "I remember having complicated feelings about it, sitting with the other patients who were hoping the procedures would help them," she says. Skloot was not a typical teen: She was an autodidact who read voraciously on the history of science.
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