In Praise of the Obsessed
I just watched Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning, and it’s nuts. One sequence had more action than most movies pack into their entire runtime. But here’s the thing: the bar for Mission: Impossible is so absurdly high that I left thinking, “Great… but not even Top 3 in the franchise.”
Then, like usual, I watched the behind-the-scenes stuff. Tom Cruise talking about jumping off cliffs on motorbikes, clinging to planes mid-takeoff, training for years just to film five minutes of footage. I just sat there thinking this guy is insane.
But also, the kind of insane we need.
That level of obsession where passion and madness blur is magnetic. The curiosity to ask what’s the dumbest, riskiest, most impossible thing we can do that still somehow works on film. And then actually doing it. Not because he has to, but because he wants to. It’s rare. It’s why Dead Reckoning still hits even if it’s not the best in the franchise. Behind all the explosions and tech, there’s this pulse of human insanity driving it.
It reminds me of Kobe Bryant.
Watching Kobe break down basketball in interviews or write about the game in his incredible book The Mamba Mentality, you see it instantly. The hunger. The obsession. That monk-like, maniac-level desire to be better.
He didn’t just play basketball. He devoured it. Studied it like a language. Obsessed over footwork, angles, positioning, tempo. Adjusting a jab step by inches. Reworking how he created space. He wrote, “My mindset was I’m going to figure you out. Whether it was AI, T-Mac, Vince, or today’s LeBron, Russ, Steph, my goal was to solve them. I was willing to do way more than anyone else.”
For him, the grind was the joy. Every detail matters. Every rep is sacred. You don’t just remember points or trophies, you remember the process.
I believe this mindset showed up in Charlie Munger too.
On the surface, he’s very different. No bright lights, no arenas, no rings. Just a quiet man with thick glasses and a stack of books. But the fire is there. Munger seemed to approach life with relentless curiosity and a desire to figure things out.
He built what he called a latticework of mental models, tools for thinking pulled from economics, psychology, engineering, biology, and history. He believed that understanding the world from many angles helped him make better decisions and avoid mistakes.
Munger wasn’t trying to dunk on anyone. But he was trying to win. Like Kobe, he was willing to go further than most, read more, think harder, wait longer, and be less reactive.
So why am I talking about all this? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s late. I’m tired, and amazed by the dedication Cruise brings to his films. But somewhere in all that, I realized, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen that kind of relentless desire. It shows up across fields, in a select few.
These days, it’s common to complain about work. Hell, I do it. We look for ways to automate, to streamline, to get more by doing less. That’s why it hits differently, when someone chooses the opposite road. That kind of obsession. That refusal to settle for anything less than your best, even when no one’s watching. We feel it. Even if we don’t understand exactly what they do, we recognize the love and care behind it.
Maybe that’s the real Mission Impossible: caring at full volume, with everything you’ve got, for as long as you can.
Thanks for reading.
Cover image taken from Unsplash