People sometimes call me obsessed with what I do, as if that were a bad thing. Actually, I think obsession is required if you really want to achieve your goals.
No one cares about your goals as much as you do.
If you do what everyone else does, you may get the same results. If you want to be outstanding in something, you have to put in more work than others. That is where sustained focus comes in.
https://twitter.com/gijsheerkens/status/1538829141386137607
- When I want to succeed with my own business, I work on improving something every day, and have done so for ten years. At the moment I'm in a 231-day streak of bug fixing, adding content and general improvements. No weekends or holidays, every day at least one thing has to be improved. That work now earns me a good income.
- When I want to have a better body composition, I never miss a workout. I never skipped a single exercise. I study nutrition until I understand the basics and I eat clean every meal. I resist the social pressure to drink alcohol or eat crap. And I don't mind to spend money on a good personal trainer. I’m starting to see results.
- When I want to learn Spanish, I show up every single class. I never missed one class. I do my homework, ask questions and hire a personal Spanish teacher. I’ve become fairly fluent.
- When I'm doing a challenge to write 50 blogs in one year, I show up every single week to write one. This is the 31st article, right on schedule, so it seems I'm going to meet it.
This all pays off because of compound interest, a poorly known but critical concept for success, sometimes called "The eighth wonder of the world" by Einstein himself. You need habits for that, for habits you need discipline and for discipline you need obsession.
At least, that’s how I see it, which might be due to my highly conscientious personality. To make it all manageable, I try to have two, max three obsessions at a time.
On the other hand, moderation is the path to mediocrity and failure. I think people sometimes use moderation as an excuse to avoid discipline, often due to cognitive dissonance and the empathy gap. No one in the top 5% of any given field ever came there without some degree of obsession, though.
So that's why I'm obsessed with my goals until I get where I want to be. After that, it's perfectly okay to loosen up a bit, but for me, play comes after the work.