Obsession Doesn't Work
Reading Notes
8-10 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended
Topics and Themes
How obsession kept me from enjoying life beyond music; The dark side of obsession; Living a better life with respect to our needs.
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I suspect that I came off as ridiculously intense to my colleagues when I was at college. I arrived to the guitar program with halfway decent guitar-chops but with zero experience playing jazz and classical guitar. I barely had any knowledge of music theory. Because I felt so behind, I practiced 6 to 8 hours a day on top of schoolwork, classes, and the occasional jam session. Practicing took a great deal of time away from just being a kid, enjoying my life, and at exploring who I was. I grew up in college, but a little faster than I think was healthy. I bet many reading this blog can relate. Sometimes, we creatives do more than is necessary to make things happen.
When I look back, I most clearly remember the emotional heaviness of my time at college. I didn't allow myself the chance to slack off. The upside was that I felt the continued march of progress, but I never measured up to the ideal firmly placed in my mind. I was always practicing, always engaged, always a hyper-motivated overachiever. Nose permanently attached to the grindstone. A slog. A rat-race of my own creation.
There were additional costs to my extreme focus. I had multiple bouts with carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. I felt tired all the time because I refused to give myself rest days. When I slept through my alarm, I totally chastised myself for it. I didn't explore or travel. I missed thousands of chances to meet really interesting people. I smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank many cups of coffee to keep myself going. I ate poorly. I buried my ever-growing feelings that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't ever going to be good enough, underneath an avalanche of work. During a few dark nights of the soul, I wondered if I was really going to amount to anything. A few times, I wondered if I was even born to be a musician.
I wouldn't change a thing about these experiences. Sure, I shake my head at the sheer dumbassery of it, but hindsight is 20/20. I learned. As my Dad often said, "The only time you mess up is if you make the same mistake twice."
The hyper-motivated creatives I know (and love) seem especially vulnerable to the style of focus I had in college. These creatives often get so wrapped up in their own thoughts, ambitions, or achievements that engaging with the world beyond seems tough. To many of them, what’s going on with the culture they live in has the potential to overwhelm and challenge them beyond what they're able to handle. What an occupational hazard! Don't get me wrong: I think the willingness to go myopic can can bring something gorgeous to the world. I just don't believe we need to take our creativity so seriously that we forget about our immediate and pressing realities, or miss some great opportunities to take our lives in newer, more interesting and enlightening places. Sure, some hard-working souls might defend their passionate, single-minded focus with vigor. But I don't think focus is quite the right word for it. What I'm talking about is obsession.
I believe there needs to be a broader discussion about the merits of obsession. Culturally, it's clear that many people in America today believe that obsession will lead to success, wealth, and prosperity. A former student of mine remarked that she worked 100+ hour weeks for two years as an investment banker. Another friend of mine who owns a store in South Austin often proudly (but heavily) speaks of his heavy 90+ hour workweek and how much profit his store makes. I have friends in the film industry who work so hard that I see their health deteriorating, right before my eyes.
Health issues aside, the emotional and spiritual costs of obsession are legion. I can't help but worry about my friends in the film industry. If they receive any recognition or success, they think it's the result of how obsessed they are with "making it." But, if their success doesn't come, I see them get incredibly despondent. I've seen them want to quit the creative life. If I let them know I’m worried about them, it doesn’t help. They might tell me I'm crazy for taking the weekends off. They have the narrative that they need to be 110% committed, obsessed, working til their eyeballs bleed, or else they won't be successful.
I suppose I ought to just come out and say what I really think:
Obsession just doesn't work. There's something that stinks to holy hell about it.
Obsession blinds us to the realities in our actual day-to-day lives. It forces a myopic, it-has-to-be-this-way attitude that can at times be super incongruent with what is actually important. It has an intense inflexibility to it. It forces a woodenness in our thinking that can catch fire and burn everything up in a heartbeat (this happened to me, and it was an epic fail). It has the potential to create massive health issues due to a continued lack of balance. It makes us wonder if we'll ever "make it," if we'll ever be at the top of our games, if we'll ever experience the outrageous success we think we deserve.
Obsession's biggest chink in the armor is that we can lose our focus quickly upon a shake-up of our life circumstances, either negative or positive. I experienced this firsthand when I fell in love in the last semester of graduate school. I felt so good that I simply put the guitar down for two months. I was sick of relentless pace of practicing and performing. I felt incredibly raw, tangled, and creaky, and the idea of being with a gorgeous woman took over my attention completely. Can you blame me?
What's the point of being obsessed if circumstances change? What good is obsession if it blurs our original quest for expression? What's the point of being obsessed if it means we can't remain flexible enough to take advantage of something better? Why be ridgidly obsessed if we miss things that have great potential for bringing a great deal of happiness to our lives?
To me, obsession's many dark sides make it untenable. If you're with me on this, perhaps the next question to ask is whether one can thrive, succeed, and prosper without obsession. Can we actually create anything without being completely obsessed with it? Can we be at the top of our game AND have balance?
I think we can, and Trevor Lawrence, a well-known NFL quarterback, is living proof that we can work hard and keep it light and easy:
...I want people to know that I’m passionate about what I do and it’s really important to me, but I don’t have this huge chip on my shoulder, that everyone’s out to get me and I’m trying to prove everybody wrong, And I think people mistake that for being a competitor. I think that’s unhealthy to a certain extent, just always thinking that you’ve got to prove somebody wrong, you’ve got to do more, you’ve got to be better.
Lawrence's post confused a lot of sports commentators and fans. Many accused him of being unmotivated to play the game. He basically snubbed the ethos in America that we need to be obsessed with our work to be successful at it. Yet, the fact is that Lawrence works harder than anyone else at being the best NFL quarterback possible. He's motivated. To use his words, he grinds hard. He's a living example of a highly successful person who isn't obsessed with what he does and still works harder than anyone else at it. Although I'm not the biggest fan of the NFL, his willingness to stand by his words and to value balance over having a chip on his shoulder offers a perfect example of how to do great work without killing ourselves.
I have since learned the value of balance in my life. I have learned to keep my commitments light. I rest on the weekends, often getting 10+ hours of sleep. If I sleep even longer, I shrug it off and tell myself that I must've needed the sleep. I allow myself to fully relax at home, with no structured activities. I travel more. I make time to smoke cigars with my closest friends. I invest a lot of my time into people who make me feel like I've already arrived to where I want to be in my life. I invest my energy into feeling the future that I want. Like attracts like.
Obsession might work to get you a high degree of success. It might help you achieve your wildest dreams. I won't argue with it. There’s some truth to that. It certainly has worked for others. But at what cost? There are many tradeoffs.
It helps to know that success can come in many more forms than just our career. Being rich in happiness is being rich indeed. Having a wealth of friends, a community, good neighbors, and silence when we need it? All of these are godsends. Sleep is the new sex. Having the ability to take the day off if we need one is one of the biggest luxuries imaginable. Hard work can have a lightness and ease to it. We can grind hard without harming our bodies. We can do good work when we do it with love for ourselves, with respect for what we've been given. It’s worthy of our time, the very limited amount of time we have on earth, to challenge ourselves to be a little bit more like Trevor Lawrence: Grounded, hard-working, overachieving, balanced, content, and (I think) happy.