You can fit so many little lives inside this limited existence you have on this earth.
It is true that we have only one attempt at this life, however, this one attempt consists of nearly infinite amounts of skills you can learn, people you can meet, and things you can build—and it is only up to you to decide which ways to go. Those skills and activities usually crystallize into short seasons of sprints where it seems like nothing else exists—like this is your entire life, your obsession.
And what I’ve realized is—that it is those small lives, those sprints, those obsessions—that make my life worth living, and what moves me toward my goals and my dreams.
In the previous essay I was obsessively contemplating the topic of obsessions. I wanted to look at obsessions from a more positive point of view, not just as a synonym for addiction, but as something you can use to make your life better—to make huge progress in a short time. And today, I want to follow up on this with the realization I had a few days ago:
The majority of my most fulfilling and productive days—the days I made the biggest progress with my task at hand—were always more or less parts of what I call ‘obsession sprints’.
When you’re obsessed about something—it is the only thing that exists in your mind. You can’t think about anything, or anyone else. Now, depending on the obsession it can either make your life worse (eg. doing cocaine) or better (eg. exercising). However, no matter the activity, be it the healthiest and most positive thing you can do, or the worst of them—take it to the realms of obsession—and it will drastically change your life by eating everything that has not strong enough shell or deep enough roots to stay in your life.
If we ignore the obviously bad obsessions (for which I much rather use the word addiction) and concentrate on the ‘good ones’, that can make a positive change in your life, there is still a risk that this activity can consume our whole life and by that—destroy the health, relationships, and other passions. That—at least for me—is not the outcome I want to achieve. What I want to achieve by obsessing about some activity is getting as good at it as possible as fast as possible, without completely destroying the rest of my life. I’m fine with some of the parts stagnating or getting a little worse for some time, but I don’t want to lose them completely. And I’m happy to say I found the way. It is the seasonal sprint.
This tool is especially good when you’re trying to learn a new skill, adopt a new hobby, or in any other way change your day-to-day life.
A seasonal sprint is a period in your life, when you have one (or sometimes more) activities you feel very obsessed about. It is the only thing you think about, the only thing you want to do, and you see huge meaning and future in it. When your life has an obsession like this, go all in. Go all in, but don’t be stupid about that. You have to do it smartly. What use would this newfound skill have in your life if everything else was nothing more but dust? The ideal outcome of a sprint like this should be that you’ve learned/improved skill and now you’re able to do minimal effort maintenance to keep it at the desirable level (for example physique or mental health) and also don’t lose too much on the rest of your life (for example the skills you’ve gained from previous sprints).
The purpose of a sprint isn’t to go long distances. Sprint usually lasts in the range between six months and two years (the exception is if this activity of yours turns out to be something you want to sacrifice your whole life to which happens very very rarely). The goal is to make the most progress in the least possible time and at the same time, make sure you’re not ruining the other parts of your life. For this, you can use the good ol’ 80/20 rule. Find the 20% that are responsible for 80% of the outcomes in all your activities. This means you limit your exercise, school work, socializing, and everything else to the absolute minimal sustainable amount and all of your newfound time and energy you will invest into the subject of the current sprint.
Let me give you here 2 examples from my recent past. The first was exercising. This obsession was holding me for over 2 years. I was structuring my entire life around my training and diet. I was constantly thinking about the gym, my next training session, optimizing my plan, and everything else related to it. When I was at school, when I was at home, when I was in bed trying to fall asleep—always. During that time I limited my social contacts a lot. I was no longer initializing activities and was saying yes only to the best invitations. This had 2 effects. I had more time for the gym and I realized who are my real friends a who are just pretenders. There were times I was nearly force-feeding myself to be in a big enough caloric surplus to gain muscles. I was doing sets to absolute failure—to tears. I was in constant pain from the amount of physical activity, but I loved it. And after those 2 years, when this obsession was inevitably starting to fade away, I already build a good enough base physique that I’m now able to do the minimum effective amount of exercise and still keep myself in shape I’m satisfied with.
After gym obsession came an obsession with my mental health, I consider this sprint the most important of them all, because it gave me a base on which I can build everything else. Without good mental health, you have always one leg on a break, no matter how hard you work. For around six months it was the number 1 priority, nothing came before it. I was meditating for an hour every day, journaling like a madman, doing cold showers and plunges, going on long walks, and overall talking to myself and getting to know myself better. Realizing who am I, what I want to do, what are my struggles, and my pain points. I analyzed everything about my life down to the smallest details. I was looking for patterns and ways to optimize and improve my well-being, and my mental baseline. And after those 6 months, my priority slowly, but surely switched to something else because I felt I optimized my mental health enough, to start working on something else. But this doesn’t mean I instantly threw all my mental health practices into the bin. Absolutely not. I took the core of those activities, those most important 20%, and kept them in my life which means I’m able to keep my mental health levels on satisfying levels without sacrificing my entire life for it. However to get to this level, I had to do this sprint, without it I would never make the progress fast enough, but once I got to the place I wanted to be, the amount of work I needed to do to stay here significantly decreased.
This notion goes with pretty much everything else in life. It is much harder to get to a baseline level than to stay on it. And this is all the obsession sprints are about. To create this baseline on the activity so after this hype will eventually fade away you already learned all the basics you need to now do the most important 20% and keep slowly improving in it or at least stay the same without putting insane amounts of time and energy in it.
The main point of these sprints is to slowly but surely make your life better. Each sprint, you learn some new skill, adopt some new habit, or taming a bad addiction. After each sprint, you put this skill into maintenance mode, to keep it in your life, but to free up space for something new. With each successfully finished sprint you have a new tool in your repertoire, a new skill, a new superpower you can use.
And that’s, my friend, how you win in life…
Wish you a wonderful day and see you soon.
Mental health
Gym
Programming
Writing