🏴 On isolation, discipline, and love of the game.

To the obsessed,

Here are your Ten Bullets.

Ten ideas to help you build companies, make art, and fuel your obsession.

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Newsletter Update:

• The weekly newsletter is back- with a slight change after this edition.

• Starting next Saturday- it will be hosted on Substack (nothing needed on your end to receive it- subscribers transfer)- with a change in format from the ‘list’ of Ten Bullets.

• Newsletters will now feature longer-form writing, on specific ideas/topics.

• Obsessioncore links/quotes/recommendations will still be included, with a section at the bottom of each edition.

Thanks for reading. Stay obsessed.

1. On isolation, imagination, and Kobe Bryant’s obsession:

On his obsession:

On his imagination and isolation:

— Roland Lazenby, Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant (h/t Founders Podcast #272 for the recommendation)

On ‘getting into character’ for his 61pt game at MSG:

2. On Djokovic’s discipline:

Congrats to Djokovic on Olympic gold, and truly reaching The Pinnacle.

3. On overnight success:

4. On the books we need:

"The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us."

— Franz Kafka (a letter to Oskar Pollak)

5. On books:

“Being a manga artist is an extremely difficult job. Your work schedule and your desire to give the fans what they deserve can make your life harder and isolate you from the world. And if you are a mangaka of the most sold manga, then your life becomes difficult to a whole another level.

Oda was only 22 when One Piece premiered, so the 48-year-old artist has already been painting the epic adventure tale for nearly half his life. Even after 18 years, readers rarely complain that One Piece has become old or is getting degraded.

Editors who have worked with him describe him as a “machine,” who never stopped at his peak. Critics characterize him as one of the hardest-working artists in the industry, and his devotion to his profession has gotten him hospitalized in the past.

Oda maintains an extremely busy schedule and does a lot of the drawing for One Piece himself. Oda gets up at 5 a.m. Worked all day and went to bed at 2:00 a.m. This was his sleep regimen before 2013 when he was hospitalized due to health issues. During the week, he only got three hours of sleep. He takes one whole day to sleep off the rest of his week after submitting the manuscript by the end of the week. Oda deprives himself of sleep, and he’s been doing so since the early 2000s when his anime series One Piece became successful.

His health dips from time to time, yet this does not affect his ability to write outstanding chapters. For a long time, One Piece has reigned supreme in terms of popularity and sales.”

— Eiichiro Oda Reportedly Works 20 Hours a Day, FandomWire

6. On ‘the most obsessed person I know’:

“A great deal of the appeal for these books is the obvious high quality of the materials, due almost entirely to T&F founder Jason Killingsworth’s obsession with making books using the fanciest stuff he can get his hands on.

He refuses to use normal paper, and instead flies to Sweden to get a particular blend of paper stock he likes. He then insists upon working with a particular Italian book-binder who uses the exact grain of leather he wants. If you ask, Killingsworth will explain to you exactly why the spot-UV varnish on his books’ slipcase interior is absolutely necessary.

The result is a collection of books that cost upwards of $200, and which his collectors are more than happy to pay for.

The idea driving the business, Killingsworth says, was “What if Tune & Fairweather charged a price where fans could serve as the financier of those expensive high-end print finishes? I believed they would do so in order to have a collectible that echoed their own love of the game. A tangible object to encapsulate the game’s spirit. A kind of Aladdin genie lamp—a treasure that seemed so divine that if you ran your hands over it, the spirit of the game’s very creator might snake out from between the pages to greet you.

As a kid, Killingsworth says, “I was broody, obsessive and incapable of doing anything halfway.”

As a 12 year old, Killingsworth got hooked on guitar and effectively locked himself in his room until he could play every song from Metallica’s Black Album. When tasked with summarizing the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo as part of a summer reading assignment, he got lost in the book and wound up turning in a 40-page handwritten treatise that covered every notable event in the book.

Looking back, Killingsworth says he probably pushed away potential girlfriends with his natural penchant for “intensity that bordered on desperation.”

— ‘The Most Obsessive Person I Know,’ an interview with Jason Killingsworth by Ryan Rigney (Substack)

7. On creativity:

“All creative activity is, to some extent, done partly with the intention to rectify or fix yourself. In other words, by relativizing yourself, by adapting your soul to a form that's different from what it is now, you can resolve— or sublimate— the contradictions, rifts, and distortions that inevitably crop up in the process of being alive. And if things go well, this effect can be shared with readers.”

— Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

Whether or not you want to write books, there are some incredible chapters in here on creativity, and what makes iconic work.​

8. On effort vs. obsession:

9. On love of the game:

“To me, I could do the sport without the competitions. I love it that much. I just love it when I can spend most of my day at the pool.”

— Katie Ledecky, Olympic Swimmer, 7-Time Gold Medalist (h/t Kevin Gee)

10. On loneliness:

If you enjoyed this, forward it to an obsessed friend.

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