Elaborating an idea requires real work. This means that, once your productive obsession has run its course and you look back on the amount of work that it required, you may not be willing to undertake some subsequent, similar productive obsession. Consider the case of architect William Highet, who took it upon himself to carefully record one section of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.
Highet, a retired architect who practiced in Inverness for more than twenty years, accepted his self-created challenge in 2000 to record in scrupulous detail the most historically eclectic section of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Highet spent long days pacing off the building frontages so that he could start sketching and many quiet Sunday mornings with his wife Anne precisely measuring the building frontages using a steel measuring tape for accuracy. His obsession required innumerable visits to Edinburgh to catch the buildings’ hues at various times of the day and after more than two years of painstaking work—work recreating every window detail, every historical feature, and every nuance of color—Highet completed his record of the project, a painting comprised of six panels and measuring 30 feet in length.
Highet’s hope that his rendering of his chosen section of the Royal Mile would be preserved was fulfilled when the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland agreed to archive his work. Even so, when asked in a subsequent interview with Jennie Shields whether or not he would extend his project to additional sections of the Royal Mile, Highet responded: “I’m not ruling it out, but let’s just say that at the moment it would take an awful lot of persuading.” His response was natural enough, considering that a productive obsession typically leads to exactly this amount of work.
When your next productive obsession pops into your head, you will have this memory of hard work to contend with. You will know exactly to what extent your new obsession will not be a lark. The more we do, the more we understand what doing means, and this knowledge is bound to inform each of our subsequent decisions.
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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