By productively obsessing about ordinary matters you provide yourself with the extraordinary opportunity to bring to bear optimism, a breath of fresh air, and all of your brain’s power on your everyday problems and challenges. Productively obsessing is the way—perhaps the only way—to birth symphonies, businesses, and vaccines. But side-by-side with your desire to birth symphonies, businesses or vaccines is your need to meet your everyday challenges of mood, personality, and circumstance. Use your brain there, too.
Productive obsessions come in a limitless number of flavors, limited only by the interests of human beings and their ways to personal meaning. Many of these are shared obsessions: an author becomes obsessed with a subject and subsequently readers become obsessed with the author’s vision (think of the fans of James Joyce or Jane Austen); countless visual artists share an obsession with the power and possibility of abstraction; an untold number of medical researchers are obsessed with unlocking the mysteries of the human genome. Then there are the fans of robotics.
Consider Ian Bernstein, creator of a website filled with links to and information about BEAM Robotics, that special area of robotics whose focus is on scavenging parts, recycling components, and employing solar energy. Obsessed as a little kid with taking things like cameras and radios apart, as an adolescent Bernstein competed in a number of robotics competitions, including the International BEAM robotics games in India. Bernstein explains, “I built my first robot doll out of wood scraps at the age of 3 and progressed from there to a Meccano suit of armor for the family cat at the age of 6. I’ve been building devices ever since.”
Mark Tilden, the creator of BEAM robotics, hasn’t lost his own fascination with robots. A recent project? The release into the New Mexico White Sands Missile Range of the largest contiguous robot colony ever: a thousand units, each twelve inches long, three inches high, and moving about at twenty centimeters per second. “And,” Tilden says with a laugh, “we might not get all of them back.”
As likely as not, you are not alone in your productive obsession. There may not be an Olympics for your obsession, as there is one for fans of robotics—unless, of course, you start one!
To learn more about the ideas presented in this blog post, please see two of Dr. Maisel’s titles, Redesign Your Mind: The Breakthrough Program for Real Cognitive Change and Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
