I couldn’t resist highlighting this wonderful talk by Adam Savage (one of the Mythbusters hosts who will also be at TAM London in October, YAY!).
While I have no intense personal interest in either the Dodo or the Maltese Falcon, his passion and enthusiasm brings these subjects to glorious technicolour which are fascinating in their own right. However, the theme of the talk isn’t the objects at all – it’s an amazing insight into the creative mind and, unusually, treating the obsessiveness as a positive strength rather than a weakness of character.
This I can completely relate to, although my preoccupations are on a much smaller scale and are usually of a much shorter duration. I will research something compulsively right up until the point where whatever it is that fascinated me is exhausted. Then it is dropped.
For a long time, I considered it to be my Achilles heel. The rest of the world has even less understanding of short-duration ‘infatuations’ than the lifetime ruling passion. The messages from family, friends and my inner nag all merge into one: “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”, “you’ll never succeed if you don’t stick with something”, “do you ever finish anything?”.
However, I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that this is who I am and working out how best to turn it to my advantage. I’m learning to run with my impulses more, explore the current idée fixe exhaustively but give myself permission to drop it the moment interest starts to wane without recriminations – as Adam says in his talk, “really, if we’re all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it?”
I do need to keep a better record of my fleeting compulsions – a scrapbook with all the weird and wonderful directions my brain takes me. You never know when it could be of use. I’ve also learned in the last few weeks that the quickest way to deal with my rebellious mind is to capture any daydreams that are distracting me onto paper. By exorcising them in this way, my brain is then happy to let me get back to doing whatever it was I was supposed to be doing in the first place.
And on the plus side, I’ve got two short story ideas out of the process already.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Pete // 30th Mar 2009 at 7:50 pm
I suppose I’m a bit like this too. I like your idea of keeping a record of it – as you say, it all disappears into history a little too quickly. I should write a weekly blog post along the lines of “this week, I have been mostly thinking about…” though to be honest, for the last few weeks I’ve spent most of my waking hours trying to decide what my next bass amplification purchase should be.
2 anabels // 30th Mar 2009 at 8:44 pm
I have this problem! I am a generalist in an age of specialists. Even worse I like doing the intial data gathering and idea generation but then as far as my mind is concerned I’ve done that it’s bored and ready to move onto something else. Made writing my thesis and the endless re-edits an exercise in total frustration!
3 Ys // 31st Mar 2009 at 2:36 pm
I totally agree with you – people are people, we’re all different, we each like different things and in different ways. It’s fun to just be you and not worry about what other people expect you to be/to be doing.
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