When my obsession became greater than my passion…
Every day I try to do my best and get more work done. I push myself every hour to achieve today’s goals so that I can have the life I always dreamed of.
Even though I like my work, still I can’t help it to stop the mental exhaustion.
One day I saw an old game I used to play, it was modded and tweaked. Many new things were added and I got excited about it and wanted to download it and play.
After putting too much effort to find the download link, I didn’t find any source to download the modded game. Unknowingly, I didn’t stop there. I kept looking for how to get the game.
Later I started to watch tutorials about how to mod the game by yourself. It seemed a little complex tutorial with the list of complex prerequisite.
Still, I didn’t procrastinate. I downloaded the tools and resources and started following tutorials step by step, pause by pause to avoid tiny errors.
There were many things to be get done and many obstacles as technical errors. I watched other tutorials for such specific errors. I eliminated errors one by one and progress towards the result.
The day ended.
During the process, I never wanted to quit though I got exhausted and hungry after 4 hours. While eating, watching TV and walking things were constantly processing in my mind to find the solution without any need of my conscious effort. What if I chose another step? what if I do that instead?
While sleeping I got dreams of it doing the same things but just a weird way. You know it’s a dream. (People were sitting on my desk. I don’t know why?)
Next day, I woke up early in the morning, of course for the game. I continued to work. Making mistakes, finding solutions, redoing steps multiple times to capture the mistakes.
During this work, there were no other priorities. Because I thought one more step and I will be done, just one more hour then I will be playing the game. But it wasn’t happening.
After spending one and half-day, I had done 90% of the work. But got stuck on the remaining 10%. I wasn’t working even though I was following the tutorial step by step. I found no other tutorial for this particular problem.
I started feeling that I should quit now. However, while bathing I got a rough solution that might work. I ran upstairs and tried again+ and it worked.
I was finally satisfied. I started the game, chose the player and guess what the game crashed! I failed.
Even after this happened, My mind wasn’t ready to stop thinking about why didn’t work out. But it needed to stop as I had more important things to do.
I thought I got obsessed about the game. To get over with this, I deleted all the previously downloaded files, resources, tools and the game itself.
At last, I didn’t get the game after such work. But I had one thought about how did I manage to do some work so relentlessly without losing focus, without getting distracted, without the need to regain motivation, without exhaustion and without wanting to quit.
Why this doesn’t happen when I do my usual professional work, a little friction can lead to quitting and getting the result take weeks and weeks?
How did I get obsessed with the game?