Obsession, purpose, passion

I've lived through a few windows. In 2013 it was Amazon — people did not yet understand what it meant that you could put a product in front of the whole country from your garage. In 2016 it was Facebook, when paid reach was almost absurdly cheap, and I went all in. In 2020 it was TikTok. Each time, the door was wide open, broadly available to anybody — and most people walked past it.

Here's the part that keeps me up at night about this AI era: the windows are getting shorter. I had years to work the Facebook ads window before it got crowded and expensive. You do not have years with AI. The advantage goes to whoever moves through the door while everyone else is still deciding whether it's real.

The three words

When I look at what actually carried me through each of those windows, I keep landing on three words: obsession, purpose, and passion.

Obsession is a state of relentless mental fixation — something that consumes your attention, your energy, your thought patterns. It goes beyond interest or motivation. It refuses to let go. I can't get out of my head the fact that we're living through the greatest evolution of technology this civilization has seen, and that I'm not at the end of my life watching it — I'm in my peak years, with all of it available to me. I refuse to take that for granted.

Purpose is what makes the sacrifices mean something. Passion is what supplies the energy while you make them. You need all three, because obsession without purpose burns you down, and passion without obsession fades the first week the work gets boring.

What changed about dreams

In the past, we had dreams and a list of reasons: no resources, no staff, no technology, not enough capital. The list was real. Plenty of good dreams died on it.

That was the past. Right now, the tools will do an enormous amount of the building — the research, the writing, the systems, the follow-through — if you bring the vision and the direction. Which means the excuse list is shrinking to one item: your own energy. All you need is dreams, a vision, and the OPP to drive them.

So the honest question isn't whether this era is an opportunity. It obviously is. The question is whether you can feel the fixation — whether the thing you want to build refuses to get out of your head. If it does, feed it. If it doesn't yet, get closer to the work until it does. The window is open right now, and I've never seen one close slowly.