Childhood Obsessions

While I've been back at my childhood home for the holidays, I've been reminded about how completely absorbed I was in seemingly random interests. In my room untouched for the last few years is an extensive board game collection (including owning every single expansion / set of a game called Memoir 44), several racing drones (3 whoops, a 3 inch, and a 5 inch), and tons of chemicals from when I was shooting / developing 35mm and medium format film.

The conventional wisdom treats childhood obsessions as cute but ultimately unimportant diversions. Parents humor them while secretly hoping their kids will eventually focus on something more practical. But what if these intense interests are actually early signals of how someone's mind works best?

For me, board games and drone racing were a way to practice strategy and understanding complex systems - memoir 44's rulebooks can exceed hundreds of pages and drone racing was full of endless repair after crashes.

The intensity of childhood obsessions is what makes them interesting as predictors. A kid who memorizes every dinosaur species isn't just learning facts – they're showing an ability to dive deep into complex taxonomies and organize vast amounts of information. Whether or not they become a paleontologist is almost beside the point. The mental patterns they're developing could just as easily be applied to computer science or corporate law.

While sitting in my room at home thinking about this I was struck about how pure these interests were. Adults rarely pursue interests without some underlying practical motivation – career advancement, social status, money. The best work in almost any domain comes from people who maintain that childlike ability to become completely absorbed in a problem or question.

Of course, not every childhood obsession translates directly to a career path. The kid fascinated by trains won't necessarily become a railroad engineer. But the underlying patterns – systematic thinking, attention to detail, interest in complex networks – might point toward fields like systems architecture or logistics.

This view of childhood obsessions as career predictors is particularly relevant in an age where traditional career paths are increasingly obsolete. When jobs and entire industries can appear or disappear within a decade, perhaps the most valuable skill is the ability to become deeply engaged with new problems and master new domains – exactly what these obsessive kids are practicing.

The broader point might be that we should pay more attention to how people's minds naturally work, rather than trying to force them into predetermined paths. A child's obsessions, precisely because they're uncontaminated by practical considerations, might be the purest expression of how their mind wants to engage with the world.

This has implications for education and parenting. Instead of treating childhood obsessions as phases to be outgrown, we might want to study them as clues to how a particular mind works best. The goal wouldn't be to push kids toward related careers, but to help them understand and leverage their natural patterns of engagement.

Looking at successful people through this lens, you often find that their current work rhymes with their childhood obsessions in interesting ways. The details change, but the underlying pattern of engagement remains remarkably consistent. Maybe the best career advice isn't "follow your passion" but "rediscover what once obsessed you."