obsessive

forces of nature

Les Muses veillant sur la vallée, Henri Martin

The most enjoyable part of working in venture capital is constantly meeting smart and obsessive people. This isn’t limited to venture as an industry, but because startups are so arduous and, by definition, hack on the edge of what’s possible — there tends to be a high concentration or density of obsessive people. Obsession is sometimes the only thing that can keep something alive artificially beyond the ‘shiny idea lifespan’, long enough to generate momentum.

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.

I used to write for a student food magazine in college. Like anyone, I thought I enjoyed food. It turns out, I wasn’t obsessed with food. This became starkly obvious when I witnessed people who were truly obsessed with food-as-craft. They were roasting fennel at the back of the potluck. Mixing cardamom and black pepper for a cookie recipe. Fermenting things in oddly shaped mason jars. Slicing figs. Repurposing pork bones for broth. Wrangling with ideas of how flavor profiles and cultural notes could mesh with others in surprising and delightful ways. From the back of the room after the taste test: It doesn’t have wings yet. Let’s try again. A college dorm kitchen was transformed from a mere counter to a warm and sacred space for experimentation and expression. That’s taste. It’s effort directed toward pursuing far more than what’s convenient or expected. It’s research-like: gathering information and tuning it toward a thesis.

A man or woman obsessed is a force of nature. There is mightiness in desire, and the desire to create, to refine a craft, is perhaps one of the greatest desires of all.

When you’re obsessed with an idea or problem, you can go deeper into the thing you’re working on despite no external motivation. Even when the problem is complex, and meaty and oblique. Even when it gets more perplexing, impossibly so, over many years. The joy comes, even when you’re grasping at straws, for the moment when things click into place and make sense. Or maybe the joy comes when you’re pushing against the edge of your own cognitive or physical abilities. Or perhaps from refining your own internal world and landscape. Something deeply magical emerges out of exhaustion and pure effort. It is impossibly beautiful and elegant. It’s never perfect. Nothing ever is. But when it’s good, it’s finally really good. The inner critic goes silent.

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.

Obsessions, be they healthy or unhealthy, make us agentic and deeply human. There’s a strange, numinous, beauty to be discovered when you run deeper into the woods instead of backing away at the fringes. If I keep chipping away at this thing, something fundamental will be revealed about me.

I used to think I was good at letting go and now in many ways stopping feels impossible. An object in motion stays in motion. So, what are you obsessed with? As I always say — you’ll know who you are when you know what you can’t give up.

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