Your productive obsessing may drive you to create something new. Or it may drive you to preserve something that has already been created. There is great value in personal creativity and there is also great value in museum collections, heritage sites, and other conservation efforts.
Consider Dr. Robert Hart’s re-creative obsession. In 1967, he and his wife Becky bought 200 acres in Hickory, North Carolina imagining that they would create a wildlife rescue and retreat center. Instead, the Hart’s have recreated an entire village, now known as the 1840 Carolina Village, which they’ve opened to the public for one day a year since 1985.
Dr. Hart, a physician and former Marine Corps fighter pilot, and his wife first created ponds and wildlife refuge areas on their acreage. But when one of Dr. Hart’s patients suggested that they needed an historically authentic lob cabin on the land and pointed the Hart’s toward one (the Hunsucker Cabin, circa 1840), they caught “cabin fever.” The Hunsucker Cabin became the first of 70 authentically restored buildings, including churches, public houses, and a granary, which now comprise the “1840 Carolina Village.” The Harts relied on leads from family friends and patients, and from sightings made by Hart as he flew his Cessna 150 over the surrounding area.
Hart would photograph his new acquisitions, number the logs at their joints, dismantle the structures, and carry them away on his old flatbed truck. According to Nathan Moehlmann in Our State magazine, today “each building, furnished according to its use, is in itself a museum, and Hart’s wife, Becky, who has been instrumental in determining both the site of the buildings in the village as well as their interiors, has encouraged him to look now only for items that will round out the collections.”
There is a productive obsession to fit every personality and every interest. There are productive obsessions for history buffs, born storytellers, inveterate collectors, librarians, lovers, adventurers, and homebodies. What’s yours?
[This post is part of an ongoing series of Redesign Your Mind posts on the art of productive obsessions. Please enjoy the whole series for a complete picture of how to use “redesign your mind” techniques to create and cultivate productive obsessions.]
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
