I suggest to folks who are interested in the idea of cultivating productive obsessions that they try their hand at productively obsessing for a month. As shorthand, let’s call this “the productive obsession program,” though there is hardly anything programmatic about it. If there are steps to it, they are only the two most obvious ones: you choose your productive obsession and you bite into it.
A month is an interesting amount of time. Georges Simenon, the Belgian novelist who created the Inspector Maigret mystery series, routinely wrote his novels in a month’s time—in three weeks, actually, with a week left over for golf. In a month, you could create a business plan and begin to enact it, write enough songs for an album, or track an idea from its first glow to its polished articulation. If you can get from San Francisco to Paris in twelve hours, what can’t you do in a month? You could get in a lot of productive obsessing; or learn about your idiosyncratic ways of preventing yourself from using your brainpower. In a month, you could produce a brainstorm or learn why you refuse to cultivate brainstorms.
Your month may fly by without you ever really getting started. That is information; and probably means that most of your months fly by without you attending to your goals and dreams. Probably your ideas stay vague and swirly rather than growing ever sharper. Probably you find yourself still fighting old emotional battles. Probably the microscopic is overwhelming the grand. If your month flies by and little productive obsessing has occurred, take that as information and as a clarion call to work your second month differently.
What are you really doing when you devote yourself to a month of productive obsessing? You are doing the following: you are learning how to extinguish distractions so that you can concentrate; you are accepting the existential fact that, if you intend to matter, you must act as if you matter; you are retraining your brain and asking it to stop its pursuit of fluff and worry and embrace its own potentiality. In addition, you are announcing that you prefer grand pursuits to ordinary ones; you are standing in solidarity with other members of your species who have opted for big thinking and big doing; and you are turning yourself over, even to the point of threat and exhaustion, to your own loves and interests.
A brainstorm is a brain event orchestrated by a human being. It is not a brain event in a bell jar, a brain event separated from the facts of your existence, or a mechanical firing of neurons. It is a human thing created by a human being as part of that human being’s life plan. It is a symphony wanting to exist in the heart of a composer. It is a theory of evolution not yet formulated in the heart of a naturalist. It is a non-profit arising from a flesh-and-blood person’s actual compassion. Your month-long program, which becomes an infinitely long program as you repeat it, is not a program for brains-in-bell jars but for individuals who want to assert their individuality and manifest their values.
Cultivating productive obsessions has little to do with egotism. Ego requires few neurons; any idiot can be an egotist. There are no greater narcissists than ordinary people who think about nothing and from that throne of vacuity make grandiose pronouncements. My hunch is that you’ll experience your month of productive obsessing not as ego-ridden or ego-driven but rather as a month of pure service: of service to an admirable idea of your choosing. We get smaller when we are not productively obsessing: by not engaging our brain, we waste our neurons on preening and posturing.
This is an action-oriented program. You take a mental vacation from your everyday way of being, from your affinity groups, your twittering, your social networking, your Internet surfing, your blog reading, your worries and doubts, your constant neuronal firing in the service of not all that much, and you turn an idea that fascinates you into something real in the world, into a substantial chunk of your novel, a robust business plan, a round of excellent experiments, into something that requires both thinking and elbow grease. This productive obsession program is not about spending time in the brain as if the brain were a destination. It is about using your brain in the service of the work you intend to accomplish.
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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