I’ve been referencing the word obsession a lot in the past few weeks.

I’ve been watching my close friends getting pulled by their vision in the creator economy.

I’ve been reading success stories of hyper-obsessed people, trying to find their secret sauce.

But for some reason, I still haven’t experienced anything of what these people are talking about.

Things like…

Being so obsessed that you forget to eat.

Being so obsessed that you go 4 hours working without even noticing it.

So obsessed that you can’t fall asleep because you just can’t stop thinking about stuff.

This reminds me of Mr. Beast & his unhealthy obsession with YouTube.

The fact that he would talk to his mastermind group every single day for 1,000 days in a row.

The fact that sometimes they hopped on a call at 7 AM and went to sleep at 10 PM.

The fact he’d taken about 1,000 thumbnails just to analyze whether there’s a correlation between brightness & the number of views the video gets.

When you hear all of these people telling their stories & you see them building their things, you often get a desire to do the same.

You want to find your thing as well.

You want to build great things.

But here’s the catch:

No one can tell you how to go about it.

If you want to truly build something exceptional, you can’t use someone else’s experience as a guide.

We’ve talked about this a thousand times:

The unique curiosities you pursue make you irreplaceable. They make you someone worth following.

Skill That Shaped All Outliers

When you look at any giant who changed the world, whether that was

• Albert Einstein

• Mr. Beast

• Dan Reynolds (the lead singer of Imagine Dragons, I’m sorry but I’m obsessed with them)

All of the great things they’ve created came from following their gut.

Following their curiosity.

Actualizing themselves.

It sounds so easy & simple, doesn’t it?

Well, there’s one thing standing in our way:

The Dopamine Curse

Dopamine is the hormone that, besides other things, signals that we are moving in the right direction.

When you’re reading a book and you suddenly feel a spark when reading a certain passage, that’s dopamine.

When you’re scrolling through Twitter and a quote sparks excitement, that’s dopamine.

We could find thousands of other examples.

But the thing with the modern world is…

Dopamine is everywhere.

We know that.

These days, you can move your finger and in a few minutes, you get a bigger dose of dopamine than our ancestors had got in half a year.

Our dopamine receptors are cluttered.

We don’t know whether we are moving in the right direction or not, because dopamine is everywhere.

And it’s natural that we’ll rather try to get pleasure from cheap resources (like Twitter or Netflix) than get the hard-earned dopamine (coming from honing our skills).

So if you want to be obsessed like the ones you look up to…

You need to develop your gut so it’s sensitive to the right dopamine.

Once you’ll do that, you become addicted to growing, learning & creating…and that’s where the real fun starts.

Are you excited (that’s dopamine btw)?

Alright, let me fire out 3 quick tactics that will finally allow you to follow your obsession.

Or rather 3 ways I’m going to follow my obsession this year.

1) Dopamine Detox

Since you’re overstimulated with cheap dopamine…

It’s time to do a little detox.

If you take it seriously, you can try one for a week, where you basically go one week without

• social media

• Netflix & other streaming platforms

• music

• junk food

• video games

But if that’s too much for you, you can do smaller ones daily.

Try this:

Go sit in a room with no distractions.

Shut out all the devices.

Sit there for a few minutes.

And you’re allowed to open the device only when you want to study & dive deep into a topic.

The key is to shut down distractions.

Curiosity is natural. Distractions aren’t.

And this brings us to the next point…

2) Do Exploration Sessions

Once you’ve cleared your body out of cheap dopamine, you’ll get much better at exploring things that truly pull you.

Like earlier this morning:

I was sitting in my parent’s office with no phone, and I was doing research on this issue.

I was looking at some thoughts on obsession from Zach Pogrob (he has the best insights on the topic out there).

Then he recommended a podcast between Lex Fridman and Mr. Beast.

I’ve tried to find something on obsession in the time stamps.

There wasn’t anything special, so I typed in the search bar “Mr. Beast on obsession” and it recommended a snippet from the Joe Rogan podcast.

Then I remembered Dan Koe had a podcast episode on “what to do if you aren’t interested in anything.”

In the episode, he recommended going & visit a bookstore & try to find books that capture attention.

This made me interested in books about obsession, so I asked Chat GPT for some recommendations…and ended up downloading about 4 books.

Bing bada boom.

This is how it’s done.

If you incorporate these exploration phases with no distractions as often as possible, you’re onto something.

3) Dive Deeper

When you’ve found a subject you might be potentially interested in, it’s time to go down the rabbit hole.

Maybe it’s going to interest you.

Maybe not.

I love what Zach says “the obsession can change, but the feeling should stay the same.”

Lastly:

Don’t get discouraged if you won’t get as obsessed as Mr. Beast from the very beginning.

Because (I promise this is the last one from Zach):

“Finding your thing usually takes many things.”

Have a great week ahead,

— Claudia “On Her Way To Being Obsessed” Stellner

P.S.: Don’t forget to catch some sunlight today ;)