Most of the advice you get growing up is about how to live a well balanced life – how to have a job, raise a family, get some friends, find a hobby. There’s a lot of praise for the well rounded that seem to know something about everything and can do a little bit of a lot of things.
That’s what a balanced life is, right? You make time for a little bit of everything and make sure nothing ever gets neglected.
At the same time, we frown on obsession. When you’re obsessed with something, you neglect all other parts of your life in order to focus on one specific thing, one person, one place that captures all of your attention. We tend to think of the obsessed as unhealthy and missing out on important parts of life.
Balance = good. Obsession = bad.
I understand the concept, but I disagree. Obsession is not a bad word. In fact, obsession is a completely necessary part of a remarkable life because a remarkable life is filled with dreams and accomplishments that can’t be achieved without it.
Learning to stand on one foot and lean forward is more important to a life of meaningful adventure than keeping both feet firmly planted on the ground. A balanced life, I say, is for the uncoordinated.
Balance is a coping mechanism for fear.
When you’re balanced, there’s nothing at risk. And nothing ventured is nothing gained. If you’re passionate about something, nothing will drive you more crazy than trying to maintain balance. Every time you abandon your passion to pay attention to something else, you’ll feel even more out of balance.
When you have that kind of tenacity for something, your balance is found in complete immersion.
Balance makes everything equal.
Equally boring, that is. If you spend too much time searching for the middle ground, you’ll end up clipping off the most important parts of life.
Life is like a sine wave or a roller coaster. The soaring highs and the crashing lows are what make it worth living and you don’t get to have one without the other.
Everything in the middle is just time spent waiting for the next adventure.
Balance is a safe bet.
We all know what safe bets get us. Safe returns. Risk is a required ingredient in the returns we really want from life. Without it, there’s just the same ‘ol same ‘ol.
Of course, no one will criticize you for playing it safe, but they won’t praise you either.
Obsession gets results.
If you’re willing to step up to the plate and take the unpopular stance, living a life of obsession can reap all kinds of spectacular results.
Your remarkable ideas require obsession. Big ideas and plans don’t execute themselves and they don’t always wait until you’re ready for them.
An intense focus and dedication is required to bring them to life. Don’t think about all you might be missing out on, think about everything you’re gaining instead. You’re choosing to live a life that’s an inch wide and a mile deep rather than a mile wide and an inch deep.
While we’re on the topic, let’s talk about “choosing.”
A lot of people think the obsessed are mentally unstable – that we can’t help but feed our addiction. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re not zombies. We don’t have to live like this. In fact, it would be easier not to. We were given the choice of the dull middle ground or the highs and lows of passion and fulfillment.
We made a decision.
Obsession requires exclusion.
When you make that conscious choice to pursue something obsessively, you also make a choice to exclude other things from your life in order to focus on it.
As long as you understand the consequences, that’s okay. It’s necessary to push things aside that don’t matter in order to give what does all you’ve got. Just remember that what you’re working on is incredibly important. If something important has to be pushed aside, remember that you can come back to it later.
Obsession is temporary.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that obsession can be a temporary venture. People are dynamic creatures and their obsessions can and even should change with the seasons of their lives.
One obsession can lead to new discoveries, interests, and passions that widen your breadth of knowledge and exposure. That’s a much more organic way to vary your experiences than trying to rotate a bunch of things in your life that you might not even care about.
Obsession is unpopular.
It’s unpopular, but I suspect that’s because it’s a more difficult and intentional way to live than because a balanced life is simply “better for you.” It’s not. Leaning forward into life standing on one foot takes patience, persistence, and a lot of coordination.
Of course, there’s always the balanced alternative filled with hobbies and things you don’t really care about, but for some reason, I just don’t see you being interested in that kind of compromise.
*****
Just in case you missed the big launch on Tuesday, there’s still time to enter the contest to win some awesome stuff. If you want in though, you need to hurry because the contest ends at the end of the day tomorrow. If you miss out, it won’t be because I didn’t warn you!
~~~~~
Image by: CraigAllen
Man, great post. My natural inclination is to obsess over different goals and ambitions, but you actually get a surprising amount of push-back from people with comments about a need for balance. Even from myself, I often argue about whether it would be better to have wider interests.
In any case, this is just what I needed to read today.
Cheers
Hey Martin,
Thanks for the reply. That’s why I think it’s so important to realize that an obsession doesn’t have to last forever. It’s required in order to really innovate and make a difference, but you’re free to move onto something else once you’ve completed what you needed to. More of a step-by-step process to balance instead of an “all at once” approach.
Hey man great post. Everything comes down to finding your passion, things that interest you. But I am not sure where to find such a thing! Maybe one day I can discover it. Ohh and one more thing, that mustache. Is it real!? It is pretty sweet i might say.
Giordano – I think the only way to find it is to look for it everywhere. Sometimes you know what you want and you go after it, but when you don’t, the spaghetti method of throwing a bunch of things against the wall and seeing what sticks will speed up the process quite a bit.
And the mustache? That’s the real deal.
Hi Tyler – I agree on many points, namely the importance of taking risks, but I think that being obsessed and a risk taker are two different things. I would argue that most people are obsessed. With work, family, money, love, health, friends, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll.
We usually neglect some important aspects of our lives (most frequently our family or our health). Human beings were designed to be obsessive. It’s much easier to only focus on one thing. Finding a balance – do many things right with a limited amount of time and energy – is much harder.
Also, it all depends on your definition of a “remarkable life.” Is skydiving and climbing the highest peak of each continent more remarkable than working hard to raise three healthy kids who would become meaningful contributors to humanity? I don’t have the answer, but wouldn’t you agree that it’s worth raising the question?
Michel, Thanks for an awesome reply. You bring up some good points and I think agree even though you present your case differently than mine. The point I want to make is that I want people to feel free to obsess over what’s important to them. That doesn’t necessarily mean one thing – it could be a number of things. It also doesn’t have to mean they’re permanent. They can shift into new areas as you learn and grow.
There’s certainly no prescribed path to leading a remarkable life – there could never be one. Everyone is responsible to decide what will yield them the best life they could live and no path is any better than the next. My argument is only that I want everyone to decide for themselves what’s most important to them and what they’re going to focus their energy on.
I agree with the need to focus. In the end, we want people to be fulfilled in at least one area of their lives (regardless of what it is). Thanks for the interesting post!
Little Known Fact: If you obsess over balance, the universe will explode.
I think obsession is idolized in our culture, to the point that a lot of people want to be obsessed so much that they are at risk of obsessing simply to obsess, without really divining, deep down, whether their choice is really what matters to them.
Far murkier, and challenging, is to really know what you want – and then to go for it. ‘Know thyself’: Oscar Wilde. That process of going deep within goes way, way back, to the tune of native Americans and their rites of passage, which sometimes involved staying inside a circle, with no food, for days on end, in pursuit of visions.
G/
I enjoy the material you write about. You are “Right On”!!! Keep it up…
THANK YOU FOR THIS!
I’m starting to take risks with my life, I was wondering if you could give me any ideas for risks I could take, I’m kinda stumped and I need to take a risk a day for the rest of the month!!!
I needed it
I love your website, it ties in with my new blog really well
Your help would be appreciated a LOT.
Keep up the good work,
Méabh xx
Wow Tyler, thanks for taking the “dirt” out of obsession! Obsession = passion = fuel = motivation = LIVING life. Why is that so vilified?
Vilified or not, this is how things work. Without obsession nothing extraordinary would ever get done! The difference is that some people do it (i.e., get obsessed) with grace while some others don’t!
Speaking from someone who is obsessed with one thing – quilting – and who has dedicated the last year and a half to this obsession, I can say only one thing:
To give yourself permission to WANT and to act on that want with passion is the most powerful and amazing gift you can give yourself.
The world frowns on obsession because it’s the purest form of saying “I WANT X. I WANT to do Y. I WANT to FEEL Z, and screw everything else.”
What are we told from day 1 as kids “You can’t want that!” For some reason parents see wanting as bad and teach their children to stop wanting.
If you struggle finding something to obsess about, go back to the purest form. What is it that you WANT? Even if it’s some random, stupid idea, give yourself permission to WANT and to follow that want into obsession.
I’ve always been imbalanced (though in secret) and now that I’ve accumulated one more decade of experience I definetely feel terribly balanced. I think temporary imbalance is far more effective for long term balance, and what’s missing dictates my next obsession.
Oh and we’re very envious of the moustache!!
Thanks for the great post. This has really inspired me to go full force in two of my obsessions: dance and writing. I had some friends that invited me to learn how to breakdance with them, and after one day I knew I really wanted to master it. I’ve been slowing down on my practice recently, but this article makes me want to regain the obsession.
Also, you have a typo in this post. You wrote “sine wine” instead of “fine wine.” Enjoy your day!
I have Asperger’s and obsession is basically the definition of that.
I totally agree with everything you said.
At the same time I’ve found use for “balance” just in a more unconventional sense, I try to keep myself aware of what I’m taking in and excluding but I’m not aiming for the reified socially constructed “balance” I aim for “personal balance”, balance defined by what I want to do and what I want to experience and balances over time rather than trying to have everything at once(which is by definition impossible). To keep the balancing balanced I balance things when and as I see fit.