Follow Obsession 🏴

Living room of architect <n>Vincenzo De Cotiis</n>'s home near Milan, with his custom furniture. Photo by <n>Kasia Gatkowska</n>.

Before it takes over the world, it has to take over your world

“I'm not a fan of moderation. I'm attracted to extremes...what do you want your life experience to be? Do you want to be exceptional? Do you want to push the boundaries of your capabilities? Do you want to walk around in a fog butting up against your potential but never actualizing it? Then knock yourself out. Be moderate. I'm not interested in that.”


— Rich Roll

<n>Uma Thurman</n> in <n>Quentin Tarantino</n>'s film <n>Kill Bill: Vol. 1</n> (2003).

achieving everything you've ever wanted in life is on the other side of being cringe on the internet for 6-12 months

“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.”
― Franz Kafka

"Try to work on an area where there’s no words for what you do." - @kevin2kelly

“Beauty and ethics are the same. Creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical.”

**—** Yukio Mishima

"There is a need, a transient need, a violent need for being just yourself, restating, recreating, talking in your own terms about what you have learned from all the cultures, scientific and non-scientific, before you and around you. During that period you want to be almost alone, with just a few friends. You want to be undisturbed. You want to be free to think not for an hour at a time, or three hours at a time, but for two days or two weeks, if possible, without interruption. You don't want to drive the family car or go to parties. You wish people would just go away and leave you alone while you get something straight."



— Edwin Land (Founder of Polaroid)

You know you've found obsession when work makes you feel like a kid again

<n>Anni Jürgenson</n> photographed by <n>Claudia Lepik</n> for the series <n>ONE WITH THE WIND</n>.

Your brain will invoke self-sabotaging rituals to keep you safe when you know you’re on the cusp of changing everything

“The world is a museum of obsessions. It’s Steve Jobs’ iPhone, glossy and thin, Miyazaki’s hand-drawn animations, Tarkovsky’s despairing films, Gates’ personal computers, Da Vinci's flying machines, Coco Chanel’s fashion empire, John Quinn and Alfred Barr’s Picasso exhibitions in an America that shunned European artists. What we take for granted as just merely existing was once a fledgling idea, borne in a world that rejected it or wasn’t ready. Whether it died or lived hinged upon who dreamt it up, and how long they were willing to work and sometimes suffer greatly for it. Indeed, some dreams make for feverish dreaming.”


“Smart and obsessive people are, in fact, widely distributed. Artists, writers, architects, quants, hackers, engineers, product marketers, designers, medics, sportsmen etc etc. The common thread is a commitment to taste and execution. Taste as in devotion to figure out what good looks like, and execution to engineer emergence of said goodness.”

From the series <n>Mala Noche</n> by photographer <n>Céline Croze</n>.

Winning is not enough.

We must dominate violently.

An interior by designer <n>Jean-Michel Frank</n>.

On change:

“What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.”



― Leonard Sweet

Easiest way to 'get your spark back' is burning everything down.

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”


― Franz Kafka

A still of the <n>Nazgûl</n> from the 2001 film <n>The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring</n>.

A still of <n>Al Pacino</n> as <n>Tony Montana</n> in the 1983 film <n>Scarface</n>, directed by <n>Brian De Palma</n>.

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka

<n>Dionysus</n>, a 2016 sculpture by <n>Andrey Ozyumenko</n>.

“Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be... an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call ‘the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of 'life', never abandon the principle of struggle.”

<n>Kanye West</n> and <n>Kid Cudi</n> at the <n>Yeezy Season 3</n> fashion show and <n>The Life of Pablo</n> album premiere in 2016.

Everything we want will require unfathomable violence.

On Surrender:


“When I’m out there, I’m not thinking too much. I can kind of go in there, and surrender to my higher self. And just feel like someone else takes over, and does the magic.”


— Sean O’Malley (UFC Fighter)