On Obsession

Every outstanding achievement begins with an obsession.

Not motivation. Not discipline. Obsession is what remains when enthusiasm fades, when the work stops being fun, and something deeper keeps you there.

It’s the force that keeps you in the practice room after everyone else has gone home, on the field after the light disappears, in the ocean when the water turns cold and empty. Obsession is the quiet refusal to stop.

I learned about it early. At twelve, I developed mild Tourette’s tics that made me repeat the same head shake over and over. It was my first encounter with a mind caught in a loop it couldn’t release. At the time, it felt like a flaw, an embarrassment I wanted gone. Only later did I understand that I had been given an early lesson in how attention behaves when it grips tightly and won’t let go.

That pattern never really left me. There have usually been one or two things at any given time that I’ve been locked onto. First rugby. Then music and surfing. And for most of my adult life, the craft of building and backing ideas. Different chapters. Same underlying force.

Now I see it again, much more clearly, in my six-year-old son.

He is openly obsessive. He can tell you almost anything about World War II, why the Germans lost, the names of the battleships, the bombing of Hiroshima, and he can quote Churchill’s speeches with startling accuracy. When something captures his interest, his whole mind leans into it.

It isn’t always convenient. Shoelaces, for instance, do not compete well with the Eastern Front. Some parts of daily life feel impossibly dull to him. Parenting someone like this requires patience and restraint. There is a strong temptation to sand down the edges, to redirect him toward what looks more balanced, more normal.

But I know that would be wrong.

Because from the inside, obsession doesn’t feel like an imbalance. It feels like clarity. Like alignment. To the outside world, obsession often looks like narrowing. To the person inside it, it can feel like a widening, an increase in resolution, a sharpening of perception.

Obsession concentrates attention and channels energy. It creates a small, intense arena where ideas can be tested, turned over, and understood deeply. By focusing on one thing, you don’t lose sight of the world. You start to see how it fits together. Patterns emerge, and connections reveal themselves. The world opens, rather than closes.

The people who create the most enduring things tend to share this trait. They loop relentlessly on a product, a question, a craft, a problem. They don’t fully switch off. Their minds keep working quietly in the background, worrying at the edges, waiting for something to give. That persistence is often the only thing separating those who endure from those who stop.

You see it everywhere once you know how to look. Explorers crossing polar ice didn’t do it for enjoyment. Musicians don’t practice the same passage thousands of times for novelty. They do it because they feel pulled, because not doing it would feel like a kind of absence.

Most of what we admire in the world is downstream of joyful obsession. Watch Jacob Collier dismantle harmony. Watch Yo-Yo Ma with a cello. Watch Federer’s backhand. That elegance doesn’t come from talent alone. It comes from repetition sustained over years, until something mechanical becomes expressive and something ordinary becomes rare.

Every obsession is a kind of adventure. Intellectual, emotional, physical. It gives life texture. It becomes a springboard for beauty, a company, a song, a discovery, even the memory of a perfect wave.

Of course, obsession has a darker edge. It can be a way of quieting the low hum of dread that comes from knowing our time is finite. Like genius and madness, obsession lives close to a boundary, and when turned inward, or fastened onto the wrong thing or person, it consumes rather than creates.

That’s why I no longer try to fight my obsessive streak. I try to guide it. I pay close attention to what I allow it to lock onto, both in myself and now in my son. The task isn’t to eliminate obsession, but to aim it well.

At its best, obsession is one of the healthiest forces I know. It has driven me to learn, improve, build, and create. It turns repetition into progress, restlessness into focus, curiosity into something durable.

Every remarkable achievement begins with an obsession.

One of the great privileges of life, and of being born in certain parts of the world today, is being able to recognise yours and follow it carefully and deliberately, wherever it leads.