In your professional and personal life, I don't believe there is a stronger motivation than having something in mind and the desire to do it. Yet the natural way to deal with a desire to do something is to justify why it's not possible.
"I want to read more books but nobody reads books these days so how could I."
"I want to write for a magazine but I have no experience writing professionally."
"I want to build a company someday but how could someone of my background."
Our official mentors, our managers, through a combination of well-intentioned defeatism and well-intentioned lack of accomplishment themselves, among other things, are often unable to process big goals or guide you toward them.
I've been one of these managers myself. In fact I have, to my immense regret, tried too often to convince people to do what is practical rather than what they want to do. Or to do what I judged they were capable of doing rather than what they wanted to do.
In the best cases, my listener had the self-confidence to ignore me. They did what they wanted to do anyway. In the worst case, again to my deep regret, I've been a well-intentioned part of derailing someone's career for years.
So I don't want to convince anyone of anything anymore. If I start trying to convince someone by accident, I try to catch myself. I try to avoid sentences like "I think you should …". Instead "Here is something that's worked for me: …" or "Here is what I've heard works well for other people: …".
Nobody wants to be convinced. But intelligent people will change their mind when exposed to new facts or different ideas. Being convinced is a battle of will. Changing one's mind is a purely personal decision.
There are certainly people with discipline who can grind on things they hate doing and eventually become experts at it. But more often I see people grind on things they hate only to become depressed and give up.
For most of us, our best hope is (healthy) obsession. And obsession, in the sense I'm talking about, does not come from something you are ambivalent about or hate. Obsession can only come when you're doing something you actually want to do.
For big goals or big changes, you need regular commitment weekly, monthly, yearly. Over the course of years. And only obsession makes that work not actually feel like work. Obsession is the only thing that makes discipline not feel like discipline.
That big goals take years to accomplish need not be scary. Obsession doesn't mean you can't pivot. There is quite a lot to gain by committing to something regularly over the course of years even if you decide to stop and commit from then on to something else. You will learn a good deal.
And healthy obsession to me is more specifically measurable on the order of weeks, not hours or days. Healthy obsession means you're still building healthy personal and professional relationships. You're still taking care of yourself, emotionally and physically.
I do not have high expectations for people in general. This seems healthy and reasonable. But as I meet more people and observe them over the years, I am only more convinced of the vast potential of individuals. Individuals are almost universally underestimated.
I think you can do almost anything you want to do. If you commit to do doing it.
I'll end this with a personal story.
Until 11th grade, I hated school. I hated the rigidity. Being forced to be somewhere for hours and to follow so many rules. I skipped so many days of school I'm embarrassed by it. I'd never do homework at home. I never studied for tests. I got Bs and Cs in the second-tier classes. I was in the orchestra for 6 years and never practiced at home. I was not cool enough to be a "bad kid" but I did not understand the system and had no discipline whatsoever.
I found out at the end of 10th grade that I could actually afford college if I got into a good enough school that paid full needs-based tuition. It sounded significantly better than the only other option that seemed obvious, joining the military as a recruit. I realized and decided that if I wanted to get into a good school I needed to not half-ass things.
Somehow, I decided to only do things I could become obsessed with. And I decided to be obsessed in the way that I wanted, not to do what everyone else did (which I basically could not do since I had no discipline). If we covered a topic in class, I'd read news about it or watch movies about it. I'd get myself excited about the topic in every way I could.
It basically worked out. I ended high school in the top 10% of the class (up from top 40% or something). I got into a good liberal arts college that paid the entirety of my tuition. But I remained a basically lazy and undisciplined person. I never stayed up late studying for a test. I dropped out after a year and a half for family reasons.
But I've now spent the last 10 years in my spare time working on compiler projects, interpreter projects, parser projects, database projects, distributed systems projects. I've spent the last 6 years consistently publishing at least one blog post per month.
I didn't want to work the way everyone else worked. I wanted to be obsessed about what I worked on.
Obsession has made all of this into something I now barely register as doing. It's allowed me to continue adding activities like organizing book clubs and meetups to the list of things I'm up to. Up until basically this year I could have in good faith said I am a very lazy and undisciplined person. But obsession turned me into someone with discipline.
Obsession became about more than just the tech. It meant trying to fully understand the product, the users, the market. It meant thinking more carefully about product documentation, user interfaces, company messaging. Obsession meant reflecting on how I treat my coworkers, and how my coworkers feel treated by others in general. Obsession meant wanting an equitable and encouraging work environment for everyone.
And, as I said, it's about healthy obsession. I didn't really understand the "healthy" part until a few years ago. But I'm now convinced that the "healthy" part is as important as the "obsession" part. To go to the gym regularly. To play pickup volleyball. To cook excellent food. To read fiction and poetry and play music. To serve the community. To be friendly and encouraging to all people. To meet new people and build better genuine friendships.
And in the context of work, "healthy obsession" means understanding you can't do everything, even while you care about everything. It means accepting that you make mistakes and that you do your best; that you try to do better and learn from mistakes the next time.
It's got to be sustainable. And we can develop a healthy obsession while we have quite a bit of fun too. :)
I wrote an essay on my mistakes trying to convince people to do something, on doing what you want to do, and on obsession.
— Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) August 24, 2024
Ended with a personal note on developing healthy discipline, and having fun. :)https://t.co/4WWdtU6AhL pic.twitter.com/lBw7zlqWeq