Columnist

In pursuit of healthy obsession

In 2017, I took a punt on a tender which seemed laughably unwinnable. We had 48 hours to respond.

I set sleep aside, we responded, and we won.

Next, we had to deliver it. The incumbent supplier wouldn’t hand over the code. This was business-critical for a central government department, it needed to be live in six weeks, and we had to do it from scratch.

I’m at their headquarters, and they ask: “Is it possible?”

“Yes”

I was working 16-hour days for those six weeks.

I was locked in. It’s all I could think about – pure flow state. I was going to bed thinking about it, dreaming about it, and then waking up thinking about it.

My fingers literally could not keep up with my brain when typing the code.

I was probably no fun to be around... I left the office to sleep or go to Greggs. But you know what? I was loving it – genuinely. I was having the absolute time of my life.

It’s a cliché, but they say – find something you love doing and you’ll never work a day in your life.

For me, writing code, building like that – it’s not work, it’s play. It showed, too. That product launched and delivered 159 per cent against its KPI.

I heard Chris Williamson and Jimmy Carr on a podcast recently; they put it like this.

Discipline < motivation < obsession.

Discipline: “I will make myself do the thing.”

Motivation: “I want to do the thing.”

Obsession: “I can’t not do the thing.”

I was motivated to write the tender, and disciplined enough to do it.

I was completely obsessed with building the product.

Each year, as Wubbleyou has grown, I’ve written less code and built fewer products. It’s hard to be at the coalface and run a business, too.

Until this year.

Because I’ve always been good at channelling this obsessive behaviour into productive things – there are lots of good problems to solve in business and tech!

I’m happy to announce – I’ve become obsessed again. I’ve built a suite of internal products to get stuff out of my head and into the hands of the team.

Artificial intelligence has removed the time barrier to doing that.

I’m obsessed with optimising, too – how do I focus on fewer things so I have more headspace? How do I leverage AI? How do I make assets for the team to sweat over and over?

These productive obsessions come and go. All my life, in between these phases, I might latch on to something – I’ve picked up chess, read everything about World War Two, and know far more than I should about ants…

But as Jimmy Carr says, the world is full of cheap dopamine. Instagram Reels, LinkedIn, chess blitz games.

Even Claude and ChatGPT, the very things we tout as productivity boosters – they give instant gratification.

Building with AI, if we’re not careful, is like playing a slot machine. Tokens and time go in, the wheels spin, and maybe, just maybe, something flashy happens.

Without objectives, it’s the illusion of productivity.

It has that ‘just one more turn’ addiction I remember from games like Civilization V. Before you know it, it’s 2am and you said you’d stop at 10pm.

Is that an obsession productive for our life goals, or just addiction?

Instant gratification has no depth. Cheap dopamine is the bouncer at the door of true flow state and healthy obsession – where a healthy obsession achieves something we want in life.

Addiction is different; it satiates that need for the next dopamine hit.

How do we get into that flow state if our minds never dig deeper than the immediate hit, or if we can’t delay gratification for weeks on end?

How do we build the skills to solve long-horizon problems if the first rung of the ladder is the easier problems, and Claude just solves those for us without the struggle?

The struggle is a healthy tool – it builds perseverance and tolerance for failure.

Equally, I am hugely optimistic about the future.

I think, for all the challenges in the world, we’ll shape this future into something which benefits humanity.

But on my journey, I’m reflecting on what keeps me ambitious and obsessed with things which align with what I want from life. As the world shapes itself around me, how must I shape myself?

Because the world is changing – we probably see more progress now in one week than we did in a year a century ago.

Cheap dopamine is everywhere.

We can’t let the world rob us of healthy obsessions and ambitions.

We must deploy our energy to get what we want from life while enduring an attention economy, and we must be sceptical about things designed to steal or erode our attention.

Mark Renney is co-founder and managing director of Newcastle-headquartered digital agency and software development company Wubbleyou

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