Doing something that doesn’t ignite passion or bring joy is a daunting task. I used to believe that by sheer willpower and hard work alone, one could accomplish big things despite having no interest in it. But maintaining motivation over the years without intrinsic joy? Impossible. While hard work can take you far, relying solely on it will keep you on a linear trajectory. You might reach the 90th percentile in any field by hard work, but bridging the final gap demands more, a strong desire, almost bordering an obsession. The trajectory of people who channeled their obsession into careers is astonishing. Through books or articles, I’ve come across people (primarily authors) who show obsession in their work (excluding sportspersons in the list because their work ethics is widely known). I wrote this post to save their names. I’ll continue to expand on this list as I discover more.
Eric Barone is the solo creator of Stardew Valley, an adventure game about farm life. Stardew Valley has been cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Eric was a team of one. It took him four and a half years to design, program, animate, draw, compose, record, and write everything in the game, working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Modern video game development is an absurd thing, an enormous creative endeavor that requires millions of dollars. Publishers employ hundreds of developers, producers, artists, animators, designers, writers, and actors to work punishingly long days for several years at a time, some working on the most minuscule of details to create immersive worlds. There are game artists who draw rocks all day, separate audio designers who record the many different sounds made when you throw those rocks, gameplay designers who determine how much damage those rocks will do when they strike an enemy in the head.
“I put in thousands of hours on pixel art just to get better at it and better at it,” he says. “I just persevered and forced myself to learn. You realize the thing that you thought was good actually isn’t. You realize why and you improve on it. And that’s just an endless cycle.” Every part of the game was made with this kind of maddening meticulousness. Eric needed hundreds of lines of dialogue for the three dozen or so townsfolk you can interact with. He wrote and rewrote those lines for several months straight, over and over, every single day. He also created over a hundred individual cut scene moments for them—all of which needed to be tested. Each tweak, of which there were thousands, required him to reboot the game to refresh the game’s code. “It was definitely a struggle to keep my sanity,” he says.
Adam Grant, now a full professor at Wharton, became the youngest tenured professor when he was 29. He has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for 7 years. He is the author of five books, hosts a podcast, writes a weekly newsletter, and has been a consultant to Google, the World Economic Forum, The Gates Foundation etc. In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport describes Adam’s strategy to be this productive.
Within the year, [Grant] stacks his teaching into the Fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. By batching his teaching in the Fall, Grant can turn his attention fully to research in the spring and summer. [Grant] alternates between periods where his door is open to students and colleagues, and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task.
Pablo Picasso, produced about 147,800 pieces, consisting of 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints and engravings, 300 sculptures and ceramics, and 34,000 illustrations — in an impressive 78-year career. Picasso’s obsession with his craft is evident in his daily routine. He worked deep into the earlier hours of the morning. He often painted from 5:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. and then again from 6:00 a.m. until sunset, with only one hour for lunch. He would often take long walks through the streets of Paris to clear his mind before beginning a new project. Researchers have cataloged 26,075 pieces of art created by Picasso. With 26,075 published works, that means Picasso averaged 1 new piece of artwork every day from age 20 until his death at age 91. He created something new every day, for 71 years.
Stephen King, famous for his horror and thrillers, has written over 62 full-length novels, 5 non-fiction books, and 200 plus short stories. As a part of his daily routine, which is described in his memoir, “On Writing”, he blocks out 4 hours every day (including weekends) to write around 2000 words
20 hours a day, I live in the same reality that everybody else lives in. But for four hours a day, things change. And if you ever ask me how that happens or why it happens, I’d have to tell you, it’s as much a mystery to me as it is to anybody else. I have a routine because I think that writing is self-hypnosis, and you fall into kind of a trance if you do the same passes over and over.
Brandon Sanderson, one of the most prolific fantasy writers in the world, has published over 20 books, along with several novellas and short stories, totaling nearly 3,700,000 words in the last decade. For a period of time, Sanderson used to work the graveyard shift at a local hotel specifically because it allowed him to write on the job. In what the author refers to as his “apprentice” era, from 1997 to 1999, he wrote five novels. “None of them [were] very good,” he admits. “But being good wasn’t the point.” Even so early in his career—years before he sold his first novel—he understood the importance of finishing what you start. With practice, he began writing books that weren’t only good but interesting and complex. He didn’t know it then, but thanks to his dedication to writing endlessly and constantly improving, he was on his way to becoming one of the world’s most celebrated young fantasy writers.
Isaac Asimov, an American writer, famous for his Foundation series, had written or edited over 500 books and 90000 postcards in his lifetime. He began writing short stories in 1939 (aged 19) and novels in 1950 (aged 30). Asimov was so prolific his writings span every category of the Dewey Decimal Classification — computer science, religion, social science, language, technology, literature, history, geography, philosophy, and psychology. He is also credited with coining the terms “robotics”, “positronic”, and “psychohistory”.
The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write … That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.
Found this list with a similar intent - Prolific
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