When, by contrast, you announce that you intend to productively obsess about the challenge at hand, your brain is alerted to the fact that you intend to operate differently. Your neurons stand at attention, and thinking commences.

If you can get from San Francisco to Paris in twelve hours, what can’t you do in a month? You could get in a lot of productive obsessing — or learn about your idiosyncratic ways of preventing yourself from using your brainpower. In a month you could produce a brainstorm or learn why you refuse to cultivate one.

You do not want to go too long without a productive obsession in place, since that will mean that you won’t really be thinking.

By choosing to productively obsess about his horror of tackling the contract work, he’d begun to examine his assumptions and listen to his negative self-talk with a new ear — and that proved enough. He used his brain’s full power to test his assumptions and examine his self-talk and concluded — at first subconsciously and then consciously — that hi

Each of us has that do-nothing, watch-a-little-more-television place in our heart and that think-intensely and work-well place, but the latter is harder to engage. The life of your productive obsession depends on your constant recommitment to your ideals, intentions, and efforts.

You may produce fewer paintings or novels if you get in the habit of controlling your obsessions, but what you lose in inventory you gain in mental health.

he realized that he’d put the cart before the horse: the legal contract work was piling up, making him miserable, and it made no sense to try to turn his brain over to a beautiful pie-in-the-sky project when this pressing work required his immediate attention. So he lowered the bar to eye level. What was going on? Why had the contract work become s

It is vital that a person who has decided to turn the seeds of interest into full-fledged productive obsessions learn to distinguish between those things that merely interest him and those things that really interest him. If he can’t make some sensible distinctions, he may try to build brainstorms in places of insufficient interest. If, say, his “l

CHOOSE YOUR OBSESSIONS, rather than letting them choose you,