There’s been a lot of talk about how, if you do what you love, it doesn’t feel like work.
From experience, I happen to think there’s some truth in this. But I don’t think it’s going far enough.
If you really want to make a splash in your field, you don’t just have to do what you love, you’ve got to become, in some way, frakking obsessed with what you do.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean obsessed in an unhealthy way. But I do mean that you can’t help but keep thinking, continually, about the thing you love to do — whether that be creating art, writing the next great American novel, helping a client get organized, or even mastering a sport.
All of these have something in common.
Can you guess what it is?
The strength of these skills is directly proportional to the hours you put into them!
Think about it this way: when you cultivate a healthy obsession with your craft, you’re basically programming your mind to make practicing a habit. You’re short-circuiting your decision making process, so that you automatically want to work on the thing you want to gain mastery at anyway. Because when you are truly excited and enthralled by the thing you do, putting time into it will feel natural.
And that’s when the magic comes in.
You see, once you stop thinking about how much time you put into your craft, the mastery comes even faster. You put more hours in, and you get even better. And not just better—you get better a heck of a lot faster, too.
Because honestly: When you have a habit of building excellence in what you do, how can you not be successful?
Virtually the only way to manage to not be successful is if you aren’t sharing what you make, which is unlikely if you have any friends worth a dime. (As, surely, they would encourage you to share.) You see, it doesn’t matter how much value you create if you don’t deliver any to the world. You’ve got to make it available to the people who will benefit from it, too.
TL;DR
Once you develop a healthy obsession with consistently creating and delivering your value, it’s only a matter of time before people take notice. Success then becomes a matter of WHEN.
So… what are you obsessed with?