It takes a lot of ingredients to make a high achiever. Focus, discipline, resilience, drive, self-belief, pain tolerance, empathy, relationship building, and the ability to hear and respond to feedback all go into the pot. Turn up the heat and stir vigorously for a good long while. If the mix doesn't come together, that's probably because you left out the most important ingredient: obsession.
I rejected obsession because it felt like choosing between a windowless room and a vast, colorful forest. It also didn’t help that what I felt most drawn to obsess over in my youth , the media, seemed wildly impractical. I graduated in the heyday of management consulting and investment banking right before the mortgage crisis. The idea of going into the media sounded cool … while also looking like financial suicide. It felt smarter and more comfortable to skip around and try a lot of different things and gain a wide variety of experiences rather than obsess over one field, skill, or industry.
Now I know that the real reason I chose to reject obsession was that it made the impracticality of my passion more tolerable. I wasn’t closing the door on everything else to die in the windowless room of what I loved – I was using what I loved as a springboard to other more respectable and lucrative things. That meant taking the low-paying job in public media for a year or so wasn’t a path to financial ruin. It was a temporary off-ramp – a chance to cultivate rich experiences I could bring to a more lucrative industry later. It made me “interesting” and “quirky”.
That’s what I told myself anyway.
The problem with that mindset is, while it allowed me to do a lot of very interesting things with a lot of very (very) smart and interesting people, I never felt the momentum in my life and career that others looking in from the outside felt I had. I felt like I was spinning my wheels, which eventually led to burn out.
The reason I chose to reject obsession was that it made the impracticality of my passion more tolerable.
A healthy dose of obsession is the glue that holds your life story together. It brings lightness as well as momentum. It gives you a vector, traction, and a big, sharp sword to cut through the thick brush of what would otherwise seem like impossible decisions.
So, I’ve decided to own my obsession: the media. I am obsessed with all of the ways information flows one-to-one and one-to-many.
The media is endlessly fascinating from consolidation, cord cutting, streaming wars, AI talent, agentic news, and the power to make feature-film quality images and videos accessible to anyone with a smartphone.
I fully recognize that I am not unique in that I spend hours a day consuming media. Nearly all of us do that now, for better and for worse. I am unique, because I managed to work on so many different types of media over the last 20+ years – and from so many different angles.
Looking back, I rejected the label of “media obsessed” early on out of fear, but my choices have betrayed me my entire life. I wasn’t running around a vast forest of varying interests. I had locked myself in the room of my obsession the whole time! It was only when I looked at the rooms of other people’s obsessions, that I saw tiny, cramped boxes.
Now, after years of running around, I am forced to see the forest of my interests for, well, the room of my obsession. Whether it’s spending nearly two years working at SmartNews on NewsArc, getting a Master’s and MBA to learn more about how media projects get developed and financed, working at Google to learn more about tech’s role in and influence on media, or just making my own sandbox and advising nascent media projects and companies – *gasp* – I am obsessed with media!
Here’s the takeaway: For those feeling adrift today, don’t be afraid to name your obsession and own it proudly. More likely than not, embracing its constraints can ground and recharge you to confront the challenges and embrace the opportunities ahead.
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