What Drives and Compels Us to Do Great Work?
Obsession Gives You The Focus to Get Things Done.
Obsession is what drives and compels you to do great work. Obsession combined with focus can make you unstoppable.
I keep a personal journal where I write a lot about my own life and ideas I am thinking about. I have done this almost every day for the past few years and I have written on a consistent basis for the last 20 years. Something I think about often is what compels me to become obsessed with an idea or a subject.
My personality can become obsessive over ideas. No thing or subject is out of bounds. When looking back at many of my most obsessive moments, there wasn’t much of a linear line through it all. Going from A to B to C doesn’t make sense. Instead, it’s more like start at C go to 4 come back to Green and check out B and A if there is time. I’m not sure if that’s normal behavior or not.
I’ve done my most driven work when I am burning with obsession. In my early 20’s I wanted to break into the music industry. I learned everything I could about the business. What bands, and people made it tick. And I used any attempt to get my foot in the door. Looking back now, I was more successful than I realized at the time. Yet, when using money as a proxy or score, none of my gigs ever paid all that. It wasn’t until I because a full time video game composer that I made a living.
Music has been my most obsessive subject. All aspects of it. Writing it, composing it, orchestrating it, recording it, engineering it, discovering it, DJ’ing it, publishing it, and selling it. You name an aspect of the music business, and I have spent some time working in it. Except for artist management. That was never my thing. Again, it never paid me what I know I am worth and in my mid-twenties I made a change.
At 26 I found myself sitting in a classroom at a local community college in Seattle. Over the next few years I became obsessed with economics, statistics, risk management, trading, and in a way politics. At 29, I discovered how much I liked trading and I began to put small amounts of money aside to put in the markets. Finance, markets, and mathematics became my weird obsessions. I say weird because I had gone from a hippy-dippy music writing dude to a numbers driven trading wannabe. I had gone from wanting to be an A&R rep in my early twenties to a hedge fund analyst in my late 20’s. I am now 47 years old and have not done the latter and quite a bit of the former.
Near the end of my college career my focus changed again. This time I bought the start-up narrative. From there, I found myself working for a small start-up after graduation. All my classmates took jobs at big corps and I went to work on a pirate ship. Working at a start-up means living and breathing a delusion success is imminent. We were creating a new typing of buying and selling online and called it “social commerce”. We were a few years too early.
After my time ended at the startup I found myself scrounging for work. I found a few clients and became a content marketer and web developer. Sticking with content marketing was a better idea. I also became obsessed with Bitcoin and the world of crypto. I made a lot of money over the next couple of years and paid off a lot of bills. If there is anything I have noticed is that my life goes through ups and downs. Sometimes I have more money than I know what to do with and sometimes I am scraping by. When I am experiencing the former, it’s because my obsession has taken a front seat and my time focused on it.
And here I am at 47 years old, trying to discover my current obsession. I have some ideas and am working to get them off the ground. My plan is to keep myself grounded as well. My obsessions can give me flights of fancy and I ignore everything around me to my own detriment. I am determined not to let that happen.
So here is to keeping healthy obsessions. Let them drive our lives to prosperity and happiness.