A Complete Obsession
My wife and I are big movie lovers. Every year, between January and March, we race to see all the Oscar-nominated films. We watched A Complete Unknown last night and The Brutalist a couple of weeks ago. The latter far outshines the former as a movie, but both share a common theme: the creative obsession.
Timothée Chalamet, as Bob Dylan, is up at all hours writing songs. Sometimes he rushes into his apartment, stumbling over furniture, holding onto an idea in his head, hoping it won’t flitter away, and frantically writes it down. Adrien Brody, playing a visionary architect named László Tóth, paces compulsively around the construction site of his latest project, ensuring everything is built to perfection. He even admonishes and tries to fire a young worker who’s just goofing off.
There is an all-consuming something that takes over your thoughts and actions when you’re in the groove willing something to life, whether it’s a song, building, design, or program. I’ve been feeling this way lately with a side project I’ve been working on off-hours—a web application that’s been consuming my thoughts for about a week. A lot of this obsession is a tenacity around solving a problem. For me, it has been fixing bugs in code—using Cursor AI. But in the past, it has been figuring out how to combine two disparate ideas into a succinct logo, or working out a user flow. These ideas come at all hours. Often for me it’s in the shower but sometimes right before going to sleep. Sometimes my brain works on a solution while I sleep, and I wake up with a revelation about a problem that seemed insurmountable the night before. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.
If there’s one criticism I have about how Hollywood depicts creativity, it’s that the messiness doesn’t quite come through. Creative problem-solving is never a straight line. It is always a yarn ball path of twists, turns, small setbacks, and large breakthroughs. It includes exposing your nascent ideas to other people and hearing they’re shitty or brilliant, and going back to the drawing board or forging ahead. It also includes collaboration. Invention—especially in the professional setting—is no longer a solo act of a lone genius; it’s a group of people working on the same problem and each bringing their unique experiences, skills, and perspective.
I felt this visceral pull just weeks ago in Toronto. Standing at a whiteboard with my team of designers, each of us caught up in that same creative obsession—but now amplified by our collective energy. Together, we cracked a problem and planned an ambitious feature, and that’s the real story of creation. Not the solitary genius burning the midnight oil, but a group of passionate people bringing their best to the table, feeding off each other’s energy, and building something none of us could have made alone.
