Obsession as a career strategy
What feels like play now will become the leverage that sets you apart.
I was fourteen, sitting on the floor with an HTML book I didn’t understand.
Most kids at that age were glued to video games. I was glued to lines of code that refused to work. I’d type <font color=”red”>Hello world!</font>, refresh page, and nothing happened. Hours would vanish into the void of trying to figure out why the hell the text wasn’t turning red.
Nobody told me to do this. Nobody paid me. It wasn’t school. It wasn’t a “career path“. It was pure obsession.
Looking back, that one obsession shaped my entire life. It turned into a design career spanning 15 years, high-ticket clients, and freedom most people spend decades chasing. But at the time, it just looked like wasted hours on a computer.
The lie we’re told about careers
When you’re young, people feed you the same story:
Pick a safe path: be a doctor, lawyer, accountant.
Don’t waste time on hobbies.
Don’t chase distractions.
My parents weren’t trying to sabotage me. They just wanted me to be safe. They didn’t thin designing websites could be a real job. To them, speding hours moving pixels on a screen looked like playing, not working.
And, honestly, they were'n’t wrnig in their world. The jobs they grew up around didn’t reward obsession. They rewarded predictibility.
But the safe path is the slowest path.
You’ll spend years climbing someone else’s ladder, hoping for incremental raises, while the kid who’s “wasting time“ building websites or making YouTube videos for fun will race past you. Bt because they’re smarter, but because obsession compounds faster than discipline.
How obsession compounds
Most people treat learning like school: read chapter, take a test, move to chapter two. It’s slow, linear, and predictable.
Obsession doesn’t work that way. Obsession is messy. You stay up until 3am googling why <div> won’t center. You’ll break a client’s website and scramble to fix it before they notice. You copy designs you admire pixel to pixel just to feel how it works.
That’s how I learned design. Not through a bootcamp, not through formal education, but by chasing curiosity into every corner of the internet.
And there’s a hidden benefit: what looks like play today compounds into mastery tomorrow.
Because wile others are putting in their neat little two houws of “study time“, you’re drowning in it willigly. You don’t need motivation. You don’t need accountability. You want to do it.
That creates unfair sped. What others learn in years, you learn in weeks.
The turnign point
My obsession could have stayed just a hobby. It almost did.
Then life forced me to make it serious.
When my wife got pregnant, I couldn't just “play with design“ anymore. I needed income. I needed proof that this obsession wasn’t just a phase. So I tool a local office job. My first salary? $400 a month. It barely covered food.
But the difference between me and other designer designers was clear: I wasn’t just doing the assigned tasks. I couldn’t stop tinkering. I’d redesign landing pages after hours. I’d stay late learning tools nobody asked me to use. I’d question why flows are broken instead of just making things “look nicer“.
Obsession leaked out of my whenever I wanted it or not.
That obsession is what pushed me out of that $400/month trap into freelancing. It’s what landed me foreing clients who paid me 3x what local companies offered. It’s what helped me jump from $1500 retainers to $9000/month contracts.
The irony that still makes me laugh: the thing my parents thought wasn’t serious became the most serious foundation of my life.
The invisible value of obsession
Here’s a mistake most young designers make: they thing obsession is weakness. They hide it. They try to be “well rounded“. They spread their energy across safe things: a little design, a little coding, a little marketing.
But the market doesn’t rward “a little“. The market rewards the people who got way deeper than anyone else is willing to go.
Client’s don’t hire you because you’re balanced. They hire you because you’re obsessed with making their flow smoother, their site faster, and their product easier to use. Employers don’t promote you for being average at everything. They promote you because you’re the person who won’t stop until the problem is solved.
The invisible value of obsession is this:
You become the one peope can rely on
You learn faster bcause you actually enjoy the grind
You build things no one else would bother building
That’s what turns you from “just another designer“ into someone people fight to work with.
Obsession beats discipline
Let’s be blunt: discipline is overrated.
Discipline is forcing yourslef to sit down for two hours and grind through a task. Obsession is staying up all night because you can’t pull youself away.
Which one you think compounds faster?
The world tells you discipline is everything. And sure, discipline has it's place. But people who create real breakthroughs — the ones who make millions, who change industries — they’re not just disciplined. They’re obsessed.
They don’t count the hours. They loose track of them.
How to use obsession as your strategy
So how do you turn obsession into a career strategy instead of just a hobby?
Here’s a playbook I wish I had when I was younger:
Follow your curiosity ruthlessly. If you feel the urge to dive into animation, or typography, or motion design — don’t ignore it. That itch is a compass.
Build things, don’t just consume. Reading tutorials won’t get you far. Make websites. Clone products. Break things and fix them. Obsession only compounds when it’s active.
Show you work. Post ugly drafts. Share the experiements. That’s how strangers become clients. My first international cient came from a project I did for fun.
Tie obsession to outcomes. At some point, you need to make it pay. Look at where your obsession overlaps with what businesses value. My obsession with flows and interface became SaaS design contracts.
Ignore the timeline. Everyone else is asking “How long will it take to learn?“ Obsession doesn’t care. You’ll be doing it anyone, so time stops to matter. That’s the cheat code.
What it looks like in practice
When I think about the biggest leaps in my career, they weren’t logical. They weren’t carefully planned. They came directly from obsession:
Spending nights reverse-engineering how apps were built → landed my first $1,500/month client.
Writing case studies no one asked for → pulled in offers from San Francisco.
Learning Framer because it was fun → now building templates that can scale income far beyond client work.
None of these looked “smart” at the time. They looked like I was just playing. But the compounding of years of play turned into leverage.
The emotional side no one mentions
Obsession isn’t always easy.
When you’re deep into it, you’ll feel misunderstood. Friends will ask why you spend every night on a laptop instead of going out. Parents will say you’re wasting time. People will call you crazy.
That’s part of the deal. Obsession makes you different. And being different feels lonely. Until the results show up.
The same people who thought I was wasting time later asked me how I built a career that gives me freedom, remote work, and income they can’t imagine.
At some point, “crazy” flips into “genius.”
The call to the younger version of me
If I could sit down with my younger self — the kid staring at HTML code at 3am — I wouldn’t tell him to sleep more, or to be balanced, or to pick a safe career.
I’d say:
Keep going. Don’t kill that obsession. Don’t try to be normal. That obsession is your only edge. Double down on it until the world has no choice but to take you seriously.
Because obsession isn’t a phase. Obsession is a strategy.
Final words
If you’re reading this and you’re obsessing over something right now (whether it’s design, coding, writing, or whatever) don’t bury it. That’s the thing that will separate you from the thousands of people who are just “interested.”
Obsession isn’t something to tame. It’s the most valuable asset you’ll ever have.
The world will call you crazy until it starts calling you genius.