Many, if not most, kids naturally have the "bus ticket collector's" obsessiveness (http://paulgraham.com/genius.html ). Maybe it's just a question of not losing it as you get older.pic.twitter.com/OfM3asazsS
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I realize that's nontrivial. It's not simply a matter of remaining obsessed with the things that obsessed you at age four. But there might be something that can be conserved. And it means that many of us already know what this good kind of obsession feels like.
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A big part is being able to avoid doing things you don’t want to do. This gets harder as kids grow older and are forced to do other (boring) things, sapping away energy.
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'God is in the details'. I've been working with a woman in her 60s who's been criticised all her life for being too detail-orientated. I watch her curate collections, totally in flow, her hands moving unconsciously as she arranges beautiful displays of almost anything.
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Our brain normalizes. One casualty is the loss of wonder & curiosity. Consciously courting a different perspective keeps the wonder alive. Lately, I’ve started to wonder how cell division created our immune system. Suddenly old stuff gets exciting!
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When we're children, we have permission to follow our curiosity wherever it leads us. We're free to be obsessed with whatever we choose. As we age, we're taught to shelve our curiosity. We're persuaded that we can't afford to be obsessed with things that don't produce income.
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Obsession to some extent is an illusion It restrain u from other thoughts. As what you value most revolves around your thought.
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Hard to conserve it through puberty, as you care much more about sex and social status My sense is most people have to “rediscover” it as they enter adulthood
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haha! i have a distinct sense that before puberty i could hold a math problem or science thing in my head for weeks at a time and mull it over. after puberty: concentration shot! i had a half serious hypothesis that intense mathematicians never go thru puberty. never checked it
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The question is, how to keep it alive while they grow older and getting into mainstream ?pic.twitter.com/rVM86IEdwr
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A big challenge is when you start getting paid a salary for what you are genuinely passionate about. Optimization and Goodhart's law start coming into play. The same would happen to the kid if his allowance and treats were tied to how well he does in Lego competitions.
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So that genuine passion/obsession is in fact the most expensive thing in the world to get back. You can only get it by being financially independent.
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