I came into university with an Oppo. A pretty good one too, I really liked it, genuinely. It did everything I needed, and I had no real complaints. Then I got into my room, and my roommates were all on iPhones. I didn't think much of it at first. But I started using their phones here and there and I noticed things just... ran smoother. Little things. Enough to feel it. And there were jokes too, I was the only one on Android, and somewhere between those jokes and those moments of using their phones, something shifted in me. I became certain I was getting an iPhone. I had no plan. I didn't have the money. I just knew it was happening. About seven or eight months later, it happened.
I watched Ali Abdaal's video on getting rich recently. The core of it is this: if you have a 1% goal but you're putting in average effort, that gap will make you miserable. The people who actually get there are obsessed. Not motivated. Obsessed. He talks about waking up two hours before work, spending lunch breaks building, locking yourself in a room on weekends. He talks about changing your entire media diet, every podcast, every video, every book, to point in one direction. He was a medical student at Cambridge when a professor told him he was the most likely person in the room to become a millionaire, and also the most likely to get struck off the register. That story says everything. He eventually built a multi-million dollar business. Now, at 30, he does Muay Thai and plays World of Warcraft. But he's clear: that stuff comes after. Not during.
A friend of mine told me he's been thinking a lot about making money lately. My first instinct was that he needed to calm down. But sitting with it now, I think that's actually a sign. That's how you can tell someone will get what they say they want. You can see it in them. The thought doesn't leave them alone.
Athletes train for months, years, before they become champions. Jeremiah 29:13 says if you seek God wholeheartedly, you'll find him. Even God is saying: the obsession is the condition.
I know people talk about luck. And I believe in it to some extent; a moving man will meet his luck. But luck is not the engine. Obsession is. Luck is what happens to someone already in motion.
I want to be careful about how I say this next part because I know how it sounds. The phone story, the way I wanted things my roommates had, it could read like discontentment. Like I was just chasing what other people had. But I don't think that's what it was. I've been mostly happy with where I am for as long as I can remember. That's not something I'm performing. I'm genuinely okay. But being okay with where you are and going after something better are not opposites. I've always known that better is possible. That knowing doesn't leave me restless. It just keeps me moving.
And I've started to see the pattern now. The things I've gotten, actually gotten, are the things I couldn't stop thinking about. Excellence doesn't exist without obsession. I don't care if it's something new or something you've done a thousand times. The moment you stop being consumed by it, you're just going through the motions. And going through the motions doesn't get you to the 1%.
You get what you obsess over. That's just how it works.