on obsession

I firmly believe when the work stops feel like work, that's when you have reached the point of obsession and will truly excel in any field.

When you start enjoying the process, you become unstoppable.

It's when you stop having to tell yourself to get out of bed to study, or repeatedly telling yourself you need to lock in. You don't show up to show up (that's discipline!), you show up because you love it.

Obsession > Discipline

I channel a lot of my obsession today from my mindset when I was mindlessly playing hours of games a day, chasing world records or any drop of improvement. Every small mechanical mistake, or poor macro decision I would make, practicing for at least an hour a day, talking to peers in my community on improvement; I obsessed over being the best. And it truly worked out and paid off when I finally achieved that #1 spot on the leaderboard.

That's in a video game context, so it's so easy to think about showing up everyday, but what if we rethought this to be about school?

Reviewing old tests, talking to professors, practicing proof writing for an hour a day. Suddenly it sounds like a whole world of pain to the average student. I always wondered in first year how some of my peers would try advanced real analysis proofs after we had just learned what the triangle inequality was. But that was the thing all along, it was because they took a genuine interest in their work and became obsessed after.

When I look at myself now and everything I do, I realize that I'm only mirroring what I had done with my gaming days. The obsession with improvement and being the best. It no longer feels like a drag to open that real analysis textbook or reflect for an hour a day. It's truly something that I want to do, so it no longer feels like work. A playground of learning.