Andy, a lawyer, chose as his productive obsession the ordinary matter of finding his contract work less boring. He’d set up his life in a manner that he thought was well-nigh ideal, staying at home with his young children while his wife worked in the world and making enough money from his home-based legal contract work to be a real contributor to the family’s finances. His contract work paid well and could be contained to two or three hours a day. What set-up could possibly be better? Yet something had gone wrong: his contract work bored him so much that he could hardly turn to it and he found himself growing more depressed with each passing week.
He joined the cyberspace productive obsession group that I used to run with the intention of dreaming a large non-profit into existence, something that would feed his interests in a way that his legal contract work could not. But after two weeks of trying to maintain that obsession, he realized that he’d put the cart before the horse: the legal contract work was piling up, making him miserable as it piled higher, and it made no sense to try to turn his brain over to a beautiful pie-in-the-sky project when this pressing work required his immediate attention. So, he lowered the bar to eye level and stared his current life right in the eye. What was going on? Why had the contract work become so painful and odious?
He realized that he didn’t want to turn this attempt at analysis into an unproductive obsession that amounted to little more than worrying about the situation. He wanted to wonder deeply about it, not worry about it, and sensed the thinness of the line between wonder and worry. He made himself the deal that if the effort began to feel like a mistake—if it began to feel like a charming opportunity to unproductively obsess—he’d stop and splash some cold water on his face. At the same time, he understood that spending a few hours in the territory of worry might only mean that he was walking that fine line and that he might cross over into wonder at any moment.
What he discovered on the very first day was that his contract work felt more approachable. Something about deciding to productively obsess a solution into existence instantly changed his relationship to his work. It was as if a breath of optimism had entered that dark home office where his contract work lived. He couldn’t quite do the work yet, but he did open the door to the office, raise the blinds, open the window, and let the spring breeze blow through. He even did a bit of organizing—not more than ten minutes’ worth, but ten minutes more than he’d done in weeks.
This quick result surprised him. He hadn’t done any thinking yet on his problem: simply declaring that he would do that thinking seemed to make a difference and create some sort of opening. Why, he wondered, should merely declaring that he was about to productively obsess about his contract work sufficiently change his attitude that he could enter his office and raise the blinds? He nursed that idea, pursued it, made some notes, and by the third day was knocking out his contract work—even without an answer to his question.
He continued to obsess on the matter. What was going on? What had changed such that on Monday he couldn’t approach his contract work and by Thursday he was knocking it out? He concluded that he had built up the contract work into a kind of monster, internally bad-mouthing it as the most boring, unworthy work a human being could ever undertake. By choosing to productively obsess about his horror of tackling the contract work, he’d begun to examine his assumptions and listen to his negative self-talk with a new ear—and that proved enough. He used his brain’s full power to test his assumptions and examine his self-talk and concluded—at first out of conscious awareness and then consciously—that his contract work was simply not that bad.
For years he’d been too distracted—by parenting, by running a household, by all the everyday chores that distract people—to fight off his growing unhappiness with his contract work. By not possessing the mental space to fight it off, that unhappiness had festered and grown. The instant he chose to examine the matter, he produced the mental space to reconsider whether or not the contract work was all that bad—and he discovered that it wasn’t. Within weeks of that discovery he was able to move on to the productive obsession he had hoped to entertain in the first place, dreaming that large non-profit into existence.
The exact challenges you face are the ones that you need to tackle. They may prove hard to tackle for exactly the same reason that Andy’s problem with his contract work had grown intractable: if you don’t apply your brain’s full power to the matter, you don’t give yourself the chance to think it through. You remain stuck in a rut, thinking the same thoughts today that you thought yesterday, locked into a mental holding pattern where your thoughts swirl and never land properly. When, by contrast, you announce that you intend to productively obsess about the challenge at hand, your brain is alerted to the fact that you intend to operate differently. Your neurons stand to attention and thinking commences.
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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
