Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions

An Interview with Author Eric Maisel, Ph.D.

This interview is about Eric & Ann Maisel's book Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions (New World Library, 2010).

Eric Maisel, PhD, is the author of Brainstorm and numerous other titles including Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and A Writer’s San Francisco. America’s foremost creativity coach, he is widely known as a creativity expert who coaches individuals and trains creativity coaches through workshops and keynotes nationally and internationally. Ann Mathesius Maisel, MA, is a former teacher and school administrator now engaged in researching the productive obsessions of historical and contemporary figures. Her special interests are the productive obsessions of writers, artists, scientists, and naturalists. Visit Eric Maisel’s website at: www.ericmaisel.com.

What is Brainstorm about?

Brainstorm is about the way your brain really wants to work if given a chance. Our brain would love to be more focused, engaged, and passionate in our service but we’ve never been taught how to marshal all those billions of neurons. The brain isn’t that interested in the dates of battles or in conjugating verbs — in the kind of work asked of it in school. It would like to dream large and really bite into what interests it. Brainstorm explains how we can train our brain to function at its best. We do that by creating and nurturing productive obsessions, the phrase I’m using for a brain that’s really engaged and humming along. When you learn how to create and nurture productive obsessions, you find life more interesting, you get more done, and you feel alive — because your brain is operating in a gear it loves.

What’s the difference between obsessions that we don’t want and those that we do want — that is, between unproductive obsessions and productive obsessions?

Unproductive obsessions are fueled by anxiety and distorted thinking. They aren’t in our control — in fact, they control us. Nobody wants or deserves those kinds of obsessions, obsessions with things like not catching a fatal disease or not burning down your house because you forgot to turn a stovetop burner off. Those obsessions grab billions of our neurons, prevent us from thinking straight, and make us miserable. Productive obsessions, on the other hand, also grab billions of our neurons — but in the service of thoughts we want. They aren’t fueled by anxiety but by our conscious decisions about where we want to apply our brain’s power. It is one thing to obsess about the sky falling and quite another thing to obsess about some astronomical puzzle. Because people are generally anxious, most obsessions are of the unproductive sort. But when you decide to take charge of what you want to think about, when you get a grip on your mind, and when you pursue trains of thought that actually serve you, you begin to create productive obsessions and return your brain’s power to your own control.

If productive obsessions are really the way the brain wants to work, why are we so resistant to obsessing productively? Why do we have so much trouble getting passionate and obsessed?

Our body would like some exercise — but that doesn’t mean that we get up and exercise. We may dream of writing a novel or starting a business — but that doesn’t mean that we sit right down and write that novel or start that business. Human beings are surprisingly resistant to doing the things that they really want to do. The same is true of productively obsessing. Most people experience thinking as work and have to learn the habit of focusing their brain on one thing. At first they’re resistant; but once they begin to see the rewards — that life is more interesting, that they finally feel engaged, that boredom has been replaced by passion — they accept the work involved and begin to look forward to devoting themselves to their own productive thoughts.

What are some interesting examples of productive obsessions?

Obvious historical examples are the way Beethoven chewed on musical themes for decades before they coalesced into symphonies or the way Einstein tackled one mind experiment after another to help him understand relativity. But we’ve been researching less well-known productive obsessions in every sphere of human activity: art obsessions, science obsessions, activist obsessions, business obsessions, even self-help obsessions and hobbyist obsessions. There are countless fascinating obsessions that people have engaged in, from meticulously recording the tides (and providing valuable information on global warming) to lobbying for acid-free paper in the publishing industry to collecting every available font (and starting a lucrative business) to producing a series of musical scores based on a love affair with Alice in Wonderland. The range of productive obsessions is truly startling and it’s also fascinating how many of these private obsessions end up helping society in some concrete, public way.

How can you use the idea of productively obsessing to solve your personal problems?

When we have a personal problem, the usual ways we deal with it are to act impulsively, to worry about the problem but not really do anything about it — that is, to unproductively obsess about it — or to deal with it in some other hit-and-miss way. A better way is to productively obsess about it. By productively obsessing you provide yourself with the opportunity to bring to bear optimism, a breath of fresh air, and all of your brain’s power to an everyday problem. Productively obsessing is the best way — perhaps the only way — to birth novels and vaccines, but it is also the best way to meet your everyday challenges. Maybe your most pressing concern right now is finding your mother a Medicaid bed in an assisted-living facility. Maybe it’s making arrangements to keep your business running while you recuperate from an operation. Maybe it’s making sense of your career or your impending retirement. Whatever it may be, by focusing your brain on the problem you give yourself the best chance possible to find a smart, workable solution to the problem.

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