Unexisted
Obsession
“You have to be passionate about your work if you want to achieve greatness”, said every successful person ever.
Why does this keep coming up over and over again in every success story? Why is it so important to be passionate about your work?
Well there’s a certain level of ignorance to this statement. It’s not that you have to be passionate about your work, it’s that you have to be obsessed with your work, here’s why.
One cannot follow everything a great person ever did and expect the same results. Achieving anything has unpredictibility due to a lot of uncontrollable variables. Only way is to jump into the ocean and figure it out yourself. If you have enough obsession, you will figure it out through not so eligant or even a very messy process. But you will reach the end.
Maybe there’s an evolutionary theory for the above, it intuitively suggests me that there is one.
When people ask you how-to questions, it’s often a sign that they are looking for a shortcut and there’s prolly no sign of obsession there.
If you are serious about anything, you will refrain from asking how-to questions and figure it out yourself. It’s either for a deeper understanding, or for the experience, or even just a confirmation on your troubleshooting skills. There’s lessons to be learnt by figuring things out yourself. This mostly applies when you are at the early stages of learning something. Of course this doesn’t mean you cannot offload thinking capacity to others or outsource work. You can do it once you are aware of the internals.
The details you learn from the journey are not transferable. Most of the time you are not even conciously aware of the details of the skill even if you are the best at it. So when you hear great people giving out how-tos, it’s often just highlights or a few mechanical hacks prescribed to you, it’s not the whole picture.
Be obsessive, you’ll figure it out eventually.
Have some feedback or thoughts? Let me know — at hi@unexisted.com