Cultivating obsession or drive

[gumpzilla]

I'm really too lazy - under specific deadline pressures I can do pretty well, but left to my own devices I'm not so hot, as a rule. I think a decent chunk of it is the same story as a lot of other people here. High school was trivially easy, and didn't really necessitate the development of a work ethic. (Things like athletics that I was not terribly good at didn't help much either, because I was on a cross country team where coming up with innovative ways to skimp on practice was something of an art form.) College didn't, either. A couple years ago, I was back there for a reunion. A physics major I met told me that I was mentioned by name, four years after I'd graduated to people who would have no reason to know me, with regards to an incident of doing essentially half the semester's work the night before the end of the semester, a tale of heroic slackery. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

My roommate and I are similar in a lot of regards. We're both pretty lazy, when you get down to it. The chief difference between us - and why I think he's more likely to be conventionally successful as a scientist - is that he has a capacity to get really, really obsessed with what he's doing. He'll ignore a lot of [censored] that needs to get done, but devote huge amounts of time and energy to some aspect of what he's doing that has his interest at the moment. Over the years, this has resulted in him getting pretty good at his [censored]. It's definitely lent some credence to the old adage about the people who are the best at things are those who love it.

I don't really have that drive with any consistency, and I think it's one of the main things that holds me back. At this point, I think it's pretty realistic to assume I'm not going to find some career option that I'm going to fall crazily in love with and turn on the 70 hours a week switch. And I suspect a lot of people end up in the same kind of boat. So, I'm curious if anybody here has suggestions on cultivating a better work ethic, or this sense of obsession, in an effort to perform their best. Any former slackers out there with success stories of how they overcame their laziness?