productive obsession

Begin to look forward to your coming brainstorm. Begin to smile at the thought of it. Began to organize a bit in anticipation of clearing the decks. Begin to wean yourself from this or that distracting activity. Get ready. Soon you will begin a fine month of productive obsessing. I hope you are eager!

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 subconsciously and then consciously — that hi

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 one.

he realized that he’d put the cart before the horse: the legal contract work was piling up, making him miserable, 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. What was going on? Why had the contract work become s

You may produce fewer paintings or novels if you get in the habit of controlling your obsessions, but what you lose in inventory you gain in mental health.

if their obsession takes them no further than wringing their hands and spinning their wheels, it is not productive. Their obsession, as excellent as it might be if they genuinely embraced it, is as negative as any other unproductive obsession while it remains a fantasy shrouded in worry.

It is vital that a person who has decided to turn the seeds of interest into full-fledged productive obsessions learn to distinguish between those things that merely interest him and those things that really interest him. If he can’t make some sensible distinctions, he may try to build brainstorms in places of insufficient interest. If, say, his “l

You are agreeing to bleed for your art on days when your ideas torture you. Do not nod and agree to risk your equanimity and to live tumultuously unless you mean it. Maybe you didn’t quite understand what was being asked of you when, previously, you casually agreed that you were willing to take some risks for the sake of your writing. I hope that t

Most people harbor the hope that “when things change” or “when things improve” they will do a better job of productively obsessing and paying attention to their brainstorms. It is much smarter not to wait for that mythical time to arrive.