The key to achieving the biggest, hairiest, most audacious goals in life is obsession.

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The Power of Maniacal Determination

Action trumps intelligence. If you want to get smart, get doing. In my experience, few things are impossible if you’re willing to exert an extraordinary, almost fucked up amount of effort to make your dreams come true. True genius goes by the name of obsession.

But what is obsession, exactly? And how do you cultivate it to achieve great things?

I define obsession as the intersection of passion and commitment. Obsession provides the fuel to put in the necessary work to get where you want to go. It leaves no opportunity for failure, and makes you work extremely hard to learn from every mistake, even when things already seem to be going well. Obsession gives you the courage to constantly venture outside your comfort zone, changing your strategies and taking new risks–anything to gain a new level of insight. Obsession maximizes your resourcefulness and can turn a hopeless position into a draw. Or even a win.

I’d go even further and say that the only way you can ever know the full extent of your potential in anything is by practicing an unshakable commitment to achieve the desired result. If you give anything less than every fibre of your being, you’ll never know if your business idea sucked, your training methods lacked effectiveness, or if you just didn’t try hard enough.

Read the rest of Achieving The Impossible, by Brad Bollenbach at 30 Sleeps.

PS – I had a serious “hypo-manic” obsession/episode in January 2008, which resulted in a cataclysmic transformation in literally all areas of my life.

I’ve spent a good bit of time reflecting on this, talking about it with close friends, etc. I intend to write more about it soon, but the time isn’t quite right to unveil “Divine Passion Mania”, the phrase coined by my mother.

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