My wife wants to know what I’m doing.
“Sitting alone in a room is a strange way to pass your time,” she says. “And on a hot summer’s day. It’s almost noon.”
“I don’t have a choice,” I say. I don’t look away from the computer screen, my fingers still moving across the keyboard, the grey curtains half-drawn and my pale face bathed in fluorescent light. “I have to get this finished.”
“You’re obsessed,” she says.
“I’m not obsessed; I’m just focused,” I say pointing to the screen and the stack of papers next to my empty coffee cup. “The going is good, and I need to finish my work before it slips away.”
“You’re being selfish,” she says.
I don’t say anything.
She closes the office door, but we both know she’s right.
I like the idea of focusing on a single idea for hours at a time, but when I talk about focus, it’s the shiny side of the coin, the side I show to the world.
I considered calling this post “Focus On a Single Idea,” but that would have been a sanitised version of what I’m about to tell you.
Focus is a clean and easy word that I feel at home talking in public about. The other side of the coin, the side of obsession, is grubbier to look at, but don’t mistake its value.
It’s what will help you finish your work and find success.
Be obsessed. Know that you’re not done when you think you are.
You release your idea into the world; you sit back and wait and then . . . people do worse than criticise your work.
They ignore it.
Your heart cracks at the wasted time, effort, and disappointment.
You feel like a failure, and that life would be so much easier if you
didn’t have to do this hot, white creative thing. You think of stopping,
of giving up, of doing what’s easy.
You forget that the work itself is the lesson and the reward. You forget until you pick yourself up from the dirt and put one foot in front of the other.
You go back at it.
You go back at it, hard.
Because you're obsessed.