Troy Hurtubise and The Truth About Creative Obsessions
Troy Hurtubise was in his early 20s when he found his life's calling. And his calling looks like a 600-pound Grizzly. An old grizzly bear with a tuff white beard leaning up against a stump, arms folded, almost like he was waiting for Troy. Later, Troy would name the bear “Old Man” because of that furry white beard. Troy was in the mountains near Quesnel, British Columbia, and he had just been caught by a grizzly in a clearing. Troy was carrying an aluminum sluice for gold panning, a rubber dinghy, a rifle, and a knapsack. But Troy didn't aim his rifle at the bear. Instead, he dropped his gear and drew out his knives because if you're going to get eaten by a grizzly, you might as well do it in style.
Old Man attacked Troy, and after knocking Troy down and stomping around aggressively, the grizzly decided to spare his life. Had the bear been a female, Troy says he would have been killed for sure. The bear spared Troy, but the experience would change him forever. The attack imparted into him and obsession. It instilled a supernatural drive to overcome nature, to conquer the animal world, and show that he wasn't afraid.
Throughout his life, Troy would build several suits of grizzly proof armor. That same man tempted fate by creeping up on beers in the dumps of Mattawa in the hopes of getting attacked. He tried to track them through the garbage, sniffing and growling like a scout on the trail doing what Troy called “close-quarter bear research.” That's right. Today, we're talking about Troy Hurtubise, the star of the documentary called The Project Grizzly. The man who lived and died for his bear research, because we can't have an episode about creative obsession without a true obsessive like Troy.
When someone is driven to creatively do things, we call it passion. But that's the hitch; you have to do it great for it to be recognized as a passion because if you're just banging and scrap metal together to fight bears in the junkyard for no money and no glory, then we have another word for it, obsession. So today, we're celebrating obsession. We're exploring it to see how healthy creative obsession really is and how we can harness it to do more extraordinary things.
Myth 1: Obsession is never healthy. Obsession without a clear business model is just another word for addiction.
We all have different obsessions, which can be very destructive, like addictions, alcohol, anger, or sex addictions. But there are also healthy ones like fitness or inventions that can foster genuine creativity and purpose. Now, I think when we talk about obsession, it is hard for people to focus on two things at once. Troy is our example. If you were really obsessed, your time goes to one thing. You can dabble in other things, but you can't be into it fully. When you are obsessed, what you are focusing on is all that matters. You dream of it day and night, leaving little room for other things to fill. And sometimes that means neglecting other parts of your life, making it unhealthy.
We're going to quote Psychology Today on this, "Obsession, clinical psychologists think of them as fixations with an object, person, or activity. They are abnormal because they impair our capacity to love and work." So, impairing our capacity to love and work is the bit we're going to focus on. Your obsession is unhealthy if it has consequences. Basically, it's the same as any addiction. If your obsession starts incurring consequences, if you are hurting or neglecting people or people are pulling you aside to confront you, that's when you start getting into an unhealthy obsession.
Somebody can be obsessed with gardening or Facebook or going to the gym, but it doesn't necessarily mean obsession. It just means that they're paying more attention to this thing as an interest or an activity, which is not what we're talking about. Obsession can lead to unhealthy places, but we're strictly speaking about creative obsession for this episode. Creating something, according to the same Psychology Today article, the components of a healthy obsession are:
· openness to experience and change
· emotional stability
· agreeableness
Though not all obsession is destructive, if you are not hitting those three components of a healthy obsession, it may have been a slightly unhealthy obsession.
Myth 2: Where does obsession come from in the brain? Where does passion come from? And what links do they both share with creativity?
I was listening to a lecture by a writer named Brandon Sanderson. He said during his Brigham Young University lecture that when you are playing basketball, just a game out in a lot, nobody stops at the end of the game, turns to you and says, “okay, now when are you going to try out for the NBA?” But with writing, people ask you that even if you are at the lowest level. They will say, where's your book deal? We put a real emphasis on people taking their obsession and making it professional. We want to see somebody's obsession become something lucrative.
To get to that point to a rewarding passion, you have to first develop a little bit of Flow State. It's almost like the runner's high of creativity. It happens in virtually any creative activity sculpting. Whatever you're into or whatever your obsession is, I guarantee there is an element of getting locked in and getting like that. Where does this come from? There's a section of the brain called the ventral striatum. According to the Journal of Neuroscience, it's in the core/the middle of your brain, and when it's active, it lights up. It activates in proportion to how motivated a person feels. The higher your motivation, the more activity that area of the brain has.
When we talk about Flow State and euphoria of doing a passion or an obsession, it's something that hasn't been studied very much in modern psychology. However, it's authentic, and there's a reward center in your brain built for this. Northwestern University and the University of London interviewed people who had a lot of creative passion, or they were self-proclaimed obsessives to find out if there's something different with the way they tick anecdotally. They found out by surveying and evaluating 500 people's personality scores that those who sustained higher passions and obsessions in life also had greater romantic passion and featured more creativity.
Myth 3: Obsession, passion, creativity, none of it matters if it's not sustainable or makes money. And how would I know if my passion is potentially lucrative?
How do we harness obsession and make it lucrative? There are so many articles about this online, but a lot of them were actually pretty useful. I think one of the biggest trends in TED Talks and business is encouraging people to take their passions and turn them into jobs. I found a Forbes article that was good for this called The Real Secret To Make Money by Following Your Passions. Very simply put, they put up a seamless, useful equation: passion + usefulness = value.
With that in mind, whatever you are obsessive about, if you could find a way to turn it into something useful for others is amazing. It is possible. Even just taking the time to be innovative and do minor tweaks can be enough to make it into something lucrative. Now, we are not necessarily encouraging you to go out and take risks for your obsession and immediately start a business model during this pandemic. We're encouraging you to try lots of different useful obsessions. Be open to branching out and surfacing something that could be sustainable while still reflecting your passion at the same time.
Business Insider has good advice for this process as well. They say first seek out and try to get consulted and figure out how to make it into a worthy business model. They also recommend not just looking for but also creating videos, seminars, podcasts, and guides. Then start jumping into the community and see what happens and see where your passion leads.
Final Thoughts
We love leaving people with a little bit of hope and a bit of happiness. But for our creative obsession episode, I really want to share a quote from Charles Bukowski. He's a German American poet and a short story writer, and he's got a quote about obsession that I absolutely adore.
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It can mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of endurance and how much you really want it. And you'll do it despite rejection and the worst odds, and it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”