Reflect: Responding Instead of Reacting

—Do Hard Things​

Stop Trying to Be Less Obsessed

When I was 16, a lifeguard rescued me at the beach. I can still see him throwing an orange flotation device my way and guiding me beneath the pier until the water was shallow enough for me to stand. I emerged from the ocean in soaked jeans that felt ten pounds heavier, greeted by polite applause for the hero, and dozens of people asking themselves, "Did he fall off the pier?" as I shuffled back toward my parents, head down, wanting to just disappear.

But here's the kicker: I wasn't drowning.

I was an injured, obsessed runner who needed a workout on our family vacation. The hotel didn't have a gym, and my next best option was the ocean across the street. So I decided to go for an aqua jog session, where you essentially run in place in the water. But I was kind of crazy... So for almost all of my aqua jog sessions, I wore jeans to increase the resistance. I would also alternate between hands in the water and hands sticking out of the water to make the workout harder and get my heart rate up.

Needless to say, a guy in jeans raising his hands out of the water in the ocean didn't go over well. And thus, the lifeguard 'saved' me.

The foolishness of my decision aside, it gets at something underneath almost every great performer, but can also be their undoing: obsession.

Obsession Always Costs Something

At 14, I was doing 10+ mile long runs regularly. By 17, I was running 13+ miles a day, every day, for months. From the outside, it looked insane. You'd assume some parent or coach was pushing me. Nope. Just me, obsessed. My parents wished I'd ease up, especially on family vacations. And now you can clearly see why…

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Obsession is both a gift and a curse. It all depends on how you handle it, and what's fueling it.

Psychologist Robert Vallerand has spent his career studying passion, and split it into two categories:

Obsessive passion: your self-worth is on the line; you NEED to do it. You feel compelled by pressure.

Harmonious passion: you love it, you are freely choosing to do it, you're driven, but it fits your life. You WANT to do the thing.

Each can lead to peak performance. And we all have a mixture of both. Too often, we frame things as good and bad in the world of performance, but more often than not, it's about trade-offs.

Obsessive passion is really powerful. It can be like rocket fuel, driving us to do the work day after day at a high level.

It's why, in junior basketball players and water polo players, obsessive passion was related to higher levels of deliberate practice. And in a meta-analysis, obsessive passion had a larger correlation with hours per week of training than the harmonious kind.

The problem is, most of us can't harness it without the downsides showing up. The obsession starts to control us. It's almost like an addiction; the withdrawal symptoms of potentially not doing the thing are so strong that we do it. It's why, in that same meta-analysis, obsessive passion was strongly correlated with activity dependence. The thing fueling those hours per week has more fear underlying it, which can present some problems.

Obsessive passion is rigid and narrows us to what's right in front of us. It doesn't allow for the flexibility to pivot or even take a day off, when that might be the best long-term decision. Vallerand's team saw it in a study on cyclists facing a brutal Quebec winter. Only 30% rode through the winter, and obsessive passion predicted exactly who kept going. Harmonious passion predicted nothing at all. Researchers have since argued that this is why obsessive athletes tend to take more short-term risks that cost them injuries and overtraining over the long haul. The narrowing can fuel commitment, but it can also keep you from seeing anything beyond get this workout in right now. Or maybe it causes a 16-year-old to wear jeans in the ocean on vacation…

Which is why obsessive passion is related to higher rates of burnout and emotional exhaustion. It burns bright, but can also burn you out.

Harmonious passion, on the other hand, seems to be protective against burnout. We still put in high levels of work, but underneath it all is a drive for mastery. It's why athletes with harmonious passion tend to have more approach-oriented goals, while those with obsession activate both approach and avoidance goals.

So what do we do?

In social media land, I'd proclaim harmonious as the winner. But instead of optimizing for going viral, let's go with the nuance.

1. Fit Matters

​Research on 13 to 20-year-old hockey players found that in highly competitive leagues, obsessively passionate players were better psychologically adjusted. In less competitive leagues, harmoniously passionate players were better adjusted than obsessive ones.

Now, that doesn't mean the downsides go away. It just means that if everything and everyone around you is screaming to be obsessive, it feels weird not to be. It's hard to go against the grain.

It's also why in the aforementioned meta-analysis, obsessive passion's correlation with objective performance was negative in work and education, but positive in sport and the performing arts. Sport is unusually forgiving of obsession, and it rewards many of the things that come with obsessive passion. Your desk job doesn't.

If you're in one of those cut-throat environments, it's why the best coaches and organizations balance things out. They already know they have folks who are more obsessive. So they protect against the downsides. It's Phil Jackson bringing mindfulness and letting go of your ego into the NBA. It's pulling in the other direction, just enough to make sure the environment and athlete combo don't combine to drive everyone off the cliff.

2. Age Matters

Obsession is easier to carry at 13 than at 33.

In the aforementioned meta-analysis, the link between obsessive passion and burnout got stronger in older samples. Other work has found that the relationship shifts as we gain expertise.

Why? Early on, identifying with the thing is how passion forms. We move from I like to run to I am a runner. That stokes our engagement and commitment. It's what James Clear advised in his bestselling book to help make a habit stick. When we identify with the thing, it's easier to do the thing. That's why early on, that identification looks neutral, and sometimes even good.

But at some point, it turns against us. That same identification eats everything else alive. This is partially because progress slows, success gets intertwined with that identity, and we stop "playing" and dabbling in much else, as the obsession crowds out everything else.

What works to get there isn't always what works to keep you there.

3. The Rest of Your Life Matters…A Lot

Take two athletes who love running. Both are improving, choose to do it, and have a great group of training partners around them. We call this satisfying their basic psychological needs of autonomy, mastery, and belonging. All of those fuel motivation.

But what helps determine whether we're pushed towards obsessive or harmonious passion? Partially, what's going on in the rest of their life.

If one of those runners is in a shaky marriage, a job he hates, and has few friends or outlets, that person is far more likely to develop obsessive passion. In research, passion typically asks two questions:

1. Does the activity feed me?
2. Is everything else failing to feed me?

Those who don't have much else feeding those psychological needs outside of their sport or pursuit tend to develop higher levels of obsessive passion. It's filling a void. As the authors concluded:

Obsession is partly a measure of how little else is feeding you.

Once again, it's what is underneath, fueling the passion that matters. With younger folks, obsessive passion often develops as a way to explore an interest and feel like you have an identity during a time in your life in which everyone is searching for more stable moorings around their sense of self.

But…if nothing else gets developed outside of that sport as we age, that obsessive passion stays or grows because we're kind of trapped. It's the only place where we can fill our basic psychological needs. It's holding up two things: your needs within a pursuit that matters, and your needs in the rest of your life.

Over time, what once drove you becomes a weight few can bear. And you rarely see it happening. The reason obsession is hard to catch from the inside isn’t that it blinds you. It’s that it removes every occasion when you’d look. There’s never a rest day, time off, or quiet moment for perspective, because your mind is narrowed in on the only thing that matters: doing the thing. You never pop your head out of the water to ask: Why am I doing this still?

Stop Subtracting. Start Adding.

The simple story goes like this. Cultivate mastery, strive for harmonious passion. And if they don't have that, try to change it. It's advice I've given before.

​Researchers tried this approach, taking 518 people through a 4-week intervention specifically designed to raise harmonious passion and lower the obsessive variety. Their emotions around exercising improved. Their passion didn't move one bit. Nobody has really cracked this. It turns out it's not that easy to dislodge something central to who you are. And often, what you attribute to helping you get up at 5 am to do the thing.

No one was talking 16-year-old Steve out of being obsessed. It just wasn't happening. And that's true for most folks who are insanely driven. They see it as the part of them that made them great. Why would they mess with that?

So stop trying. The question was never how do I obsess less. It's what else is holding me up?

For the deeply driven, it’s building a life with enough autonomy, mastery, and belonging away from your main pursuit so that the obsession no longer has to hold up your entire life.

For a long time we posed it as harmonious or obsessive, but what we now know is that most people have a mixture. And it's the balance that really matters.

If the sport or activity is the only place you feel competent, the only place people know you, the only place you feel you have autonomy, well, I've got some bad news for you. You're on shaky ground. You're going to have obsessive passion whether you like it or not. You're going to move from I want to to I have to. Because that passion is doing a hell of a lot for you, so losing it would be existential.

The test I like to give performers is: Imagine that an injury took you away from the pursuit for 6+ months. What else would remain?

What else would you feel competent in? Where else would you belong? What part of your life would feel within your control?

The answers reveal how much weight your passion is carrying.

Build up the rest of your life. Go find a hobby. Do something that you can make progress at that doesn't have a scoreboard. Go be a beginner at something. Chess, Scrabble, bonsai trees, gardening. It doesn't matter.

Find friends and connection outside of your activity. Church, run clubs, the neighborhood guy who is always there to help or fix something, it doesn't matter.

And make sure some part of your week is genuinely yours. Where you have autonomy to decide to show up or skip a day.

Obsession narrows us. It does so in the short-term, as it makes getting in the workout the most important thing in the world, so you do it. It also does so over the long haul. The more obsession pays off with success, the more we double down. It crowds out everything else in our life. Early on, we've got some in-built safety nets (school, family, friends) that force us to have at least a little bit of life in there. But over time, those safety nets disappear, and we increasingly enter environments where the obsession is rewarded. It's why obsessive passion becomes a bigger predictor of burnout as we age. The cost doesn't show itself early, only years down the line. When our world has shrunk so much that it seems like there's no way out.

If you're a coach, parent, or teacher, your job isn't to get them to train less. To tell them to "chill out." No one is listening to that. Your job is to provide the counterbalance, to build up the other side. To be the Phil Jackson preaching being centered and having people read Siddhartha for perspective. It's to create an environment which allows people to have just enough outside of the pursuit to keep them sane.

Because when you're in the ocean with jeans on, throwing your hands above the water, it looks like being dedicated to the craft to you. Outside, it may look like you're drowning. The hardest part of obsession is that both can be true.

-- Steve Magness​

P.S. I’m working on some research on how YOU or performers you lead handle the arena. Fill out this survey if you want to help. It takes 5 minutes.

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Listen — "Consistency Over Intensity: How to Show Up Again and Again (and Again)"

Consistency is one of the fundamental skills of any discipline. But what does it actually look like in practice? Today on "excellence, actually," we're answering five of the most common questions we get about the challenges of trying to be consistent in everyday life. You'll get a breakdown of how to stack good days both in the short- and long-term (and understand why those require different approaches), Steve's "build vs. maintain" framework, Brad's Sock'em Boppers analogy for beating internal resistance, ways to determine when consistency is actually holding you back, how to know when to take a zero, and learnings from Stephen King and Roger Bannister.

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