Permission To Obsess, Please

I’ve thought recently about how coaches are embarrassed about their obsession with things,and maybe how as a society more generally, (certainly in Britain), it is considered slightly odd to obsess over things.

I’ve been the person who was listening to nutrition podcasts and reading journal articles in my second year at uni, when everyone else was fed up with it because they’d had enough learning for their assignments.

I have really doubled down on my obsessions over the past year or so in AI, behavioural science, business, and marketing.

I know that other coaches are the same.

I know it’s not just me, but I know so many people who almost apologise for that obsession and say,

‘Oh, sorry, I know I’m a bit much about this’ or ‘I know I go on about this all the time.’ And I do that sometimes.

Society doesn’t really let you be obsessed with something.

You can read about something for 14 hours a day and be a normal person. It looks unemployable, it looks like a problem.

Except if you call it a business.

A business is a permission structure and a social licence to go all in on the thing you’d go all in on anyway.

This is the perspective of Tobi Lutke from Shopify.

Call it a coaching business and the obsession becomes aspirational, even though it’s kind of the same behaviour.

The coaches who understand it, lean into that intensity. Their business is their obsession that they’ve been lucky enough to monetise. The work feels like work, but it’s still the thing they’d do if nobody paid them.

I worry that the coaches who don’t get this try to make their business normal, with reasonable hours, small output, and moderate content.

They want the benefits of this container without the intensity that the container exists to enable.

So they end up with the worst of both worlds: an obsessionless business that can’t distinguish itself from the thousands of others, and no permission to be obsessed with anything else either.

Your business is a container for obsession, and the obsession is the product you sell to people.