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.
If you’ve been following this series, it’s time to choose your productive obsession right now.
Maybe you know exactly which one you intend to select. Even if you’re positive, give it a once over and make sure that it meets your current meaning needs and your present intentions. Maybe you have several good candidates but aren’t sure which one to choose. Take your best guess and commit to obsessing for a month. Maybe none of the ideas you’ve examined seem worthy, grand, or interesting enough. Then stop everything, get as quiet as you can, and invite the right idea in. If you are open to it, it will come.
When you’ve settled on your productive obsession, jot it down. Your choice might sound like “writing that novel about my grandmother,” “bringing my art therapy practice to orphanages in Africa,” “understanding evolution so well that I can write about it intelligently,” “getting my products in stores nationwide,” “recording my first album,” or “saving that wilderness area just north of town from development.” Maybe yours will sound less ambitious than these; maybe yours will sound more ambitious. Maybe yours will involve you in dynamic collaborations; maybe yours will have a go-it-alone feel to it. Whatever its particulars, make it your own. Get it named—and get ready to let it invade you.
I’ve suggested that your productive obsession be as grand or as large as you can make it. However, productive obsessions serve many useful purposes, from channeling passion to binding existential anxiety and helping us feel calmer. If pursuing a “modest” or “small” passion with obsessive intensity serves your emotional and existential needs, pursue it. I would only ask you to go through the process of mindfully choosing, to make sure that you are not passing up some grand passion that you would actually love to pursue.
The artist Jakob Marrel’s willingness to include his stepdaughter Maria Sibylla Merian in the lessons he gave his pupils in 1650’s Frankfurt produced a passion in her for drawing the natural world and led her to record some of life’s heretofore unseen processes. Born in 1647, Merian pursued an unconventional life in which her work as an artist, entomologist, and botanist took precedence over her comfort and even her health. She risked everything, at the age of 52, to travel with her daughter Dorothea to Surinam to study specimens of indigenous plants and animals, which she had only seen dried in collections, alive in their natural South American habitat.
As Merian’s biographer, Kim Todd, writes in Chrysalis: “Her careful observations of iridescent blue morpho butterflies and giant flying cockroaches made her one of the first to describe metamorphosis and laid the groundwork for modern-day biological science, particularly ecology.” Merian died in 1717 having lived a life of “untiring observation,” an almost unparalleled “example of single-minded scientific obsession.” Did her desire to see living things alive in nature, rather than dried and mounted in museums, amount to a modest and small obsession or an immodest and grand one?
Who knows where your “small” obsessions may lead!
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
—
This post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: Shutterstock