Follow Obsession 🏴

Las Vegas Police facing Mike Tyson after he'd just bitten Evander Holyfield's ear off, 1996.

Before it takes over the world, it has to take over your world

“I'm not a fan of moderation. I'm attracted to extremes...what do you want your life experience to be? Do you want to be exceptional? Do you want to push the boundaries of your capabilities? Do you want to walk around in a fog butting up against your potential but never actualizing it? Then knock yourself out. Be moderate. I'm not interested in that.”


— Rich Roll

achieving everything you've ever wanted in life is on the other side of being cringe on the internet for 6-12 months

"The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something."
@naval

“Beauty and ethics are the same. Creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical.”

**—** Yukio Mishima

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." - Yogi Barra

"There is a need, a transient need, a violent need for being just yourself, restating, recreating, talking in your own terms about what you have learned from all the cultures, scientific and non-scientific, before you and around you. During that period you want to be almost alone, with just a few friends. You want to be undisturbed. You want to be free to think not for an hour at a time, or three hours at a time, but for two days or two weeks, if possible, without interruption. You don't want to drive the family car or go to parties. You wish people would just go away and leave you alone while you get something straight."



— Edwin Land (Founder of Polaroid)

The bar is so low if you pursue one thing relentlessly for a decade

“Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.”

"Do things to make the world a weirder place." - @petewentz

You know you've found obsession when work makes you feel like a kid again

Your brain will invoke self-sabotaging rituals to keep you safe when you know you’re on the cusp of changing everything

“The world is a museum of obsessions. It’s Steve Jobs’ iPhone, glossy and thin, Miyazaki’s hand-drawn animations, Tarkovsky’s despairing films, Gates’ personal computers, Da Vinci's flying machines, Coco Chanel’s fashion empire, John Quinn and Alfred Barr’s Picasso exhibitions in an America that shunned European artists. What we take for granted as just merely existing was once a fledgling idea, borne in a world that rejected it or wasn’t ready. Whether it died or lived hinged upon who dreamt it up, and how long they were willing to work and sometimes suffer greatly for it. Indeed, some dreams make for feverish dreaming.”


“Smart and obsessive people are, in fact, widely distributed. Artists, writers, architects, quants, hackers, engineers, product marketers, designers, medics, sportsmen etc etc. The common thread is a commitment to taste and execution. Taste as in devotion to figure out what good looks like, and execution to engineer emergence of said goodness.”

On change:

“What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.”



― Leonard Sweet

If you're not being copied you haven't created something new

“‘Identity lags reality by 1-2 years. There’s a lot of psychological fallout from a rapid change in status.’ — [@IAmMarkManson](https://link.mail.beehiiv.com/ss/c/u001.o9zHwX_qjCm6hGMgr9_ndbzytJmBN_u7AQgqRw0h-csad9RbtGYSdtv6x2jMWjZlBk3gWT_nhi82B1aaUPszOHvip53pAsoE2gmZtznIOZQ8c7KZ4Emn7XKQvALqvSihAOFuyUtZ2hxx4qMs2Q6d45EpzSnW5ya1etxo5Qpb1Wb7vMC0xm38XO05BmrhA6YRb4nyJII380OCSm-VUk9bqA/45a/k-Hbf10gRbOX9BecjZbpiw/h13/h001.rAbCSh9nDHFz9QNgQY7Mlh3CBaVN1YedyCGr18JCs8Y)

"You can tell a startup idea is good when the first thing you ask is “How did this not exist already?” - Garry Tan​

  
  
Reply: "That's true for ideas in general. If an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one." - Paul Graham

“Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be... an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call ‘the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of 'life', never abandon the principle of struggle.”

nothing better than losing yourself in one singular creative project

When you can’t sleep because you can’t stop thinking about it…

When you wake up at 2:30a and think about it until 5:15…

When you forget to eat…

When peeing is too much of a distraction…

You’ve found your obsession, and you should do it even if it “fails.”

Turn off the world and create things for it

“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” - Andy Warhol

Everything we want will require unfathomable violence.

On Surrender:


“When I’m out there, I’m not thinking too much. I can kind of go in there, and surrender to my higher self. And just feel like someone else takes over, and does the magic.”


— Sean O’Malley (UFC Fighter)