This week Daring Fireball posted a blog post called Obsession Times Voice, in which John Gruber cuts through much crap and says that real bloggers don't blog for money. They don't blog for traffic or attention either. SEO is for losers and phonies, and checking your web analytics every day is pathetic. No, real bloggers blog because they can't stop thinking about something, and their writing is a direct and pure outgrowth of this obsession.
Obsession has a strong appeal for me, as I'm sure it has for others. I don't think the appeal is hard to explain. Obsession makes life a lot simpler, and this drastic simplification can be more than ample compensation for greater arduousness. It's like being Jason Bourne. Yes, you have to be on the run all the time. But on the bright side, your goal is dead simple: don't get killed. Everything else, like maximizing your tax deductions, falls away like so many superfluous distractions.
Daring Fireball follows a similarly Spartan imperative: write like nobody's business about Apple stuff. Not much room for mission creep there either.
In addition to simplicity, there is a thrilling tautness in obsession. An obsessed person is like a cat ready to pounce, a man on a wire, a soldier rushing into battle.
But I think there is also a deeper, more rational case for obsession.
Through obsession, focus can acquire the property of sharpness. Obsession in this regard is simply a species of doggedness. And through perseverance, human beings have an astonishing capacity for specialization, to the point where what one person is able to do can seem like magic to another.
A few months ago I caught a documentary on cable on the science of the traditional Asian martial arts. I tuned in on a segment featuring a martial artist who could break a tower of cement bricks with his forehead. This spectacle raised a fascinating physics question. Striking a human skull against the cement stack with the force necessary to break it would normally shatter the skull as well. So how does the martial artist manage it?
The answer was surprising, and surprisingly simple. It turns out that no one can break a stack of cement bricks with their head on their first try, at least not without splitting their skull. The ones who can pull off this stunt only gradually develop the capability, by breaking hundreds of stacks bricks of gradually increasing thickness. This allows the bone they strike with to grow much thicker than normal. Contrary to popular mystique, chopping the cement stack is not a function of some mysterious mental state or ancient Asian hocus pocus. It's a function of having physically molded a part of your body into a specialized cement-breaking implement.
A blog like Daring Fireball is like the martial artist's forehead. Its excellence is based on the oldest and most obvious of formulas: hard, focused work, the kind of work that molds you into a fine and lethal instrument for carrying out a particular task or activity. There are no magic short cuts. Obsession will certainly make that work more palatable. But talent is primarily the product of constant and focused application.