Obsession: The One Key Force Behind Reaching My Goals

I have a secret weapon when I’m pursing a goal called Obsession.

I have a lot of goals that I want to accomplish in my life. Here are two of my big ones in recent times:

1) I want to write a book.

2) I want to communicate fluently in Japanese.

These are not the only things going on in my life. I have a husband (though no kids yet), and we run a business together. My personal goals need to happen around the other aspects of my life.

In this respect, I know that I’m actually very fortunate. In addition to not having kids, we live close to where we work, and we have some flexibility in our work schedule.

What potentially gets in the way of my goals is that because we are entrepreneurs, we spend a lot of time working. Despite my work schedule having flexibility, but I also need to be at work often until late in the evening. I travel a lot, and I usually work through weekends with few days off.

My erratic work schedule has meant that I have pursued my personal goals in an erratic fashion. I would work on them when I think of them. But ‘thinking about a goal’ isn’t a very reliable way to work towards a goal, and so I use obsession as my weapon of choice.

Whenever I work towards a goal, I become obsessed with it. Sometimes to the detriment of other things in my life.

I do not let my brain relax. I’m scared of letting go of this goal from my brain, and so my brain is in a constant source of stress. I think about learning Japanese during the commute to work. Or try to squeeze in a few hours of with my grammar book at night time, staying up later than I should.

This was the method that I used to learn how to read and write Chinese. I started my obsession with Chinese during the winter break of my 2nd year of University. The seeds for my obsession had been sowed when I first visited Taiwan at 18 years old (after having moved away when I was very little). I felt ashamed of how little Chinese I knew. I felt awkward communicating with my relatives, and misunderstood because of this language barrier.

During this winter break, I spent hours searching through Youtube — which was still in its infancy at the time — for videos from Taiwan that looked remotely familiar. And I found a music video. And then another. And then a Taiwanese drama. During those 10 days, I wrote all the Chinese words that I could from video subtitles, and used a primitive google translate to help me understand what I was writing. For those 10 days, I was obsessed with reading and writing Chinese.

I woke up in the mornings, bundled myself up and I walked to my computer and took out my notepad. I would watch videos, pausing them every few seconds. I would write the sentences that I would see scroll across the screen, and then look up any words that I didn’t know, cross checking between google translate and some other language websites. I would only stop for meals before returning to my spot in the basement.

This obsession is what carried me through university, what brought me to Taiwan, and what eventually helped me become fluent in Chinese. I can read, write (somewhat), and I can communicate quite proficiently in Mandarin Chinese.

 

The Flaws of Obsession

My obsession with my goal meant that sometimes, my pursuit of my goal would also interfere with school, but other times, school would interfere with my pursuit of my goal.

When I got back to school, I continued to study Chinese writing for a while, but then homework came. And midterm exams and finals came. Being a student, this ‘regular school’, this school that I paid thousands of dollars each year for, was still the priority.

Perhaps it was because I had spent more time than I should have during my downtime studying Chinese, exam times were usually very hectic and left room for no Chinese.

When my obsession was interrupted for long enough, I would sometimes let it go for a period of time. I would read other books. Play music. Find another obsession. Until I finally armed myself with the obsession to learn Chinese again.

This on-again off-again nature of my obsession meant that pursuing my goal took a long period of time. Every year, I would have short sprints of Chinese obsession spanning usually weeks in length before it would drop off and I would hurry to pick up the slack of other aspects of my life.

Because using obsession to pursue goals meant that I could only do one thing at a time. It doesn’t mean that the only thing that I did during my spare time in University was study Chinese. But it does mean that for the few weeks that I was obsessed with Chinese, that was what I thought about when I woke up in the morning, and what I rushed to do when I got home from class. And then it would wear off and I would meet friends, or watch TED videos.

But unfortunately, my pursuit of learning Chinese took much longer than I would have preferred. Putting aside that I usually set unrealistically short timelines to do be able to learn things, but learning Chinese did take much longer than expected.

I studied reading and writing Chinese on and off on my own in Canada for about 4 years. When I came to Taiwan, I locked myself in a room for 3 months, studying “The Mandarin Times”, a newspaper for kids in Taiwan that has phonetics written beside all the words. And then it was about 2-3 years of working life in Taiwan before I became more comfortable reading, writing and conversing naturally in Chinese.

Were all my goals going to take this long?

 

The New Obsession: Japanese

I have now moved on to my next challenge and obsession: learning Japanese.

I have been studying Japanese for about a year and a half now. I’ve read 2 grammar books, made flashcards, and this month have been listening to Pimsleur to improve my speaking and listening skills. My goal of Japanese feels so close, and yet so far.

The methods I have been using to learn Japanese differ somewhat from what I used to learn Chinese. For Chinese, I needed to read reading and writing, whereas for Japanese, its writing is where I had advantage, but needed to learn other aspects of the language.

The similarity was that I used obsession to fuel me towards my goal.

But it’s been a year and a half. I’m not fluent yet. I’m not reaching my goal at the speed that I want, and I wondered if there was a better way. I need to be able to work towards my goal even when I don’t feel like it.

Additionally, I didn’t want the next 10 years of my life only focused on learning Japanese. I am unable to be obsessed with 2 things at once. My brain is confused when juggling different these thoughts in my head. I pursue my goals with less force. What could I do to help myself move towards Japanese fluency faster?

 

The Non-Obsession: Writing

To mix things up even more, I have another goal I want to pursue — I also want to write a book.

I have wanted to write a book since I was a kid. I’ve loved reading since I was a kid, and I thought that to be able to write a book would be amazing. I liked the feeling of jumping into different worlds and different perspectives through books. Maybe I could create this feeling for others.

Later, I read many books on psychology and business. I used these as seeds in my head, to grow and spout, to help me mold myself into the person I wanted to be. Maybe I could write a book that changes the way someone thinks or lives their life.

The content of the book I wanted to write has changed over the years. But the fact that I want to write a book has not changed.

Problem was that I wasn’t obsessed with it. Or haven’t been in the past. So what could I do to move my goal forward?

So the following question was in my head:

Was there something else I could do to move myself towards my goals quicker, without relying obsession?

This question, in addition to a series of very unproductive mornings, led me to my current project: The Better Morning Project.

Stay tuned to my next blog post to find out more!