Obsession: When does intense, all-in focus build mastery, and when does it break you?

What this chapter means by obsession

Popular stories about founders, artists and scientists often celebrate obsession: the person who thinks about nothing else, works through weekends and lets the rest of life fall away. This chapter asks what the evidence says about that kind of intensity: when it builds mastery, when it backfires, and how to keep the benefits without paying the worst costs.

Here, obsession means a sustained, intense, identity-level commitment to a goal or craft. You spend a lot of time on it, think about it when you are not doing it, and it has become part of who you are. The closest research term is passion: a strong inclination toward an activity you like, find important and invest serious time and energy in [1].

Not the same as OCD

This chapter is not about obsessive-compulsive disorder. In OCD, obsessions are repetitive thoughts or urges that feel intrusive and unwanted and usually bring anxiety; compulsions are rituals done to relieve it [2]. People with OCD typically experience these symptoms as foreign to who they are. "I'm obsessed with my startup" describes something a person values and identifies with. OCD affects roughly 2% to 3% of people over their lifetime [2, 3], and it is worth not trivialising it. If thoughts feel unwanted and distressing, that is a reason to talk to a professional, not a productivity tip.

The central finding of the last twenty years is that passion comes in two forms. Both involve love for an activity and heavy investment in it, but they behave very differently.

Harmonious passion: you engage freely and can stop when you choose.
Obsessive passion: you feel an inner pressure to engage and struggle to stop.

Two musicians: the dualistic model

Picture two musicians who both practise four hours a day. The first plays because music feels like an expression of who she is. When a friend's wedding clashes with practice, she goes and enjoys it. The second plays because his sense of worth depends on being "the musician". At the wedding he feels guilty and restless, and his mind keeps drifting back to the instrument. The hours are identical. The relationship to the activity is not.

Psychologist Robert Vallerand and colleagues built this distinction into the dualistic model of passion [1], which grows out of self-determination theory, the idea that people thrive when they feel autonomy, competence and connection [4]. An activity you love becomes part of your identity. How it gets absorbed decides the type of passion:

When you take it on freely, with no strings attached, you get harmonious passion. It is like a thermostat that switches off when the room is warm enough.
When strings are attached, such as self-esteem, approval from others or an excitement you cannot control, you get obsessive passion. It is a thermostat stuck on "on": it still heats the room but cannot respond to conditions.

The model predicts that obsessive passion leads to rigid persistence (carrying on when it is unwise), conflict with the rest of life and rumination, while harmonious passion allows flexible persistence: full commitment, with the ability to step back when costs grow too high.

Key studyVallerand et al., 2003

Who keeps cycling through a Montréal winter?

The 17 cyclists who kept riding through the winter had scored higher on obsessive passion (4.47 versus 2.83 on a 7-point scale) but not on harmonious passion. Their summer riding hours were the same as everyone else's. Winter riding correlated r = .49 with obsessive passion and only r = .04 with harmonious passion [1].

Design

Recreational cyclists rated their passion, then researchers checked six months later who had kept riding through a snowy winter, when riding is risky.

Who was studied

59 recreational cyclists in Montréal, part of a paper with four studies and more than 900 participants.

Limits

Small, correlational sample, run by the researchers who built the model. Winter cycling is a vivid but narrow stand-in for unwise persistence.

Where each kind of passion comes from

Young people in environments that supported their autonomy tended to develop harmonious passion. Those who strongly preferred to specialise early, relied heavily on the activity to define themselves, or had parents who valued the activity very highly tended toward obsessive passion [5]. These were correlational studies, so they show patterns rather than proven causes.

What the data say about each kind

The largest synthesis pooled 94 studies [6]. The chart compares how each kind of passion correlates with different outcomes. A dot to the right of zero means "goes with more of this"; to the left means "goes with less".

How do the two kinds of passion relate to wellbeing, practice and performance?

Average correlation (r) across studies. Harmonious / obsessive.

Harmonious passionObsessive passion

Positive feelings0.41 / 0.18

Negative feelings-0.03 / 0.25

Life satisfaction0.39 / 0.02

Burnout-0.53 / 0.13

Flow0.51 / 0.18

Rumination0.04 / 0.40

Conflict with rest of life-0.16 / 0.32

Deliberate practice0.39 / 0.33

Hours per week0.08 / 0.22

Feeling dependent on it0.30 / 0.67

Objective performance0.10 / 0.09

Source: Curran et al., 2015, meta-analysis of 94 studies [6]. Some values are small and uncertain; the last row is not statistically different from zero for obsessive passion.

Read the bottom rows carefully. Both kinds of passion go with deliberate practice about equally. Obsessive passion goes with more hours and a much stronger sense of dependence. But neither predicts objective performance much, and once the overlap between the two is removed, neither predicts it significantly at all. Obsessive passion buys more hours, not better results [6].

A meta-analysis of passion at work, with 38,481 people, found the same shape [7]. Harmonious passion went with much less burnout and better job performance. Obsessive passion was a mixed bag: more commitment, more identification with the work and more hours, but also more burnout and exhaustion, and no reliable performance gain.

Check your own pattern

Reflection tool

Can you stop when you choose to?

Think of the activity you care about most: a craft, a company, a sport, your studies. Rate each statement from 1 (not at all) to 7 (completely). This is a private reflection exercise, not a test.

The activity Optional

It sits comfortably alongside the rest of my life.
174
When I cannot do it, I find it hard to think about anything else.
174
I could take a planned week off from it without real distress.
174
My sense of my own worth rises and falls with how it is going.
174
Doing it leaves me with energy for other people and other things.
174
I keep going even when it is clearly costing me sleep, health or relationships.
174
I choose when to do it, rather than feeling I have to.
174
I feel guilty or restless when I spend time on anything else.
174

Not a validated scale and not a mental-health screen. The prompts are paraphrased for this site and only illustrate the two patterns described in the research. Nothing you enter leaves this page.

The brain's accelerator: wanting is not liking

The brain has separate systems for wanting something and enjoying it. Dopamine neurons fire when things turn out better than expected and dip when they turn out worse, acting as a teaching signal [10]. But dopamine is about pursuit more than pleasure. In experiments where rats lost almost all the dopamine in key reward areas, they still showed normal pleasure reactions to sweet tastes. What they lost was the drive to go after rewards [11]. The researchers concluded that dopamine drives "wanting", not "liking".

Their later theory proposes that in addiction, cue-triggered wanting can grow stronger while liking does not [12]. Think of wanting as the accelerator and liking as the reward at the destination. In the unhealthy version of obsession, the accelerator stays pressed even when the destination no longer feels good.

Flow: the good side of absorption

Flow is the state of total absorption where time disappears and effort feels effortless. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described it as most likely when challenge and skill are both high and roughly matched [13]. Too easy and you get bored; too hard and you get anxious.

Interactive lab

Stay in the channel

Flow research describes focus as a balance between how hard a task is and how good you are at it. Practise and your skill rises, which slowly drifts you into boredom. Take on something harder and you risk anxiety. Use the buttons or sliders to climb the staircase.

Flow channel

Challenge and skill are matched. This is where deep focus is most likely, and where skill grows.

Skill3.0

Challenge3.5

Based on Csikszentmihalyi's original three-zone flow model. The width of the channel here is a drawing choice, not a measured value.

The evidence supports this, with nuances. A meta-analysis of 28 studies found a moderate link between challenge-skill balance and flow, along with clear goals and a sense of control [14]. Flow and performance correlate at r = .31 in sport and gaming studies, but nobody yet knows whether flow causes good performance or good performance causes flow [15].

Passion matters here too: harmonious passion goes with flow far more strongly than obsessive passion (r = .51 versus .18), and once their overlap is removed, obsessive passion's link to flow disappears [6]. The compulsive version of intensity is less likely to produce the state people are chasing.

Practice: necessary, not sufficient

Where "10,000 hours" came from

In 1993, K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues studied violinists at a music academy in Berlin and concluded that expert performance is mostly the product of years of deliberate practice: focused, effortful work on weaknesses, ideally with feedback [16]. This study became the main source for the popular "10,000-hour rule", although the original paper made no promise that any particular number of hours makes anyone an expert.

How much does practice explain?

A 2014 meta-analysis asked how much of the difference in performance between people practice accounts for, across domains [17]. In 2018 the authors published a correction after fixing an error in their statistics [18]. Most articles still quote the old numbers; here are both.

How much of the difference in performance does practice explain?

Percent of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice

26%

24%

Games

21%

23%

Music

18%

20%

Sports

Education

under 1%

Professions

Original 2014Corrected 2018

Sources: Macnamara et al., 2014 [17], and the 2018 corrigendum [18].

Practice explains a meaningful minority of performance in structured, predictable domains like games, music and sport, and very little in education and professions. Among elite athletes, it explains about 1% [19]. At the top, everyone practises a lot, so practice stops separating them.

Key studyMacnamara & Maitra, 2019

Re-running the famous violin study

The best violinists had not accumulated more solitary practice by age 18 than the merely good ones (about 8,224 versus 9,844 hours, a difference that was not significant). Practice explained 26% of the variance in skill group, about half of the 48% in the original [20].

Design

A preregistered, double-blind replication: interviewers did not know which skill group each violinist was in, and the analysis plan was fixed in advance.

Who was studied

39 violinists, compared with 30 in the original study.

Limits

Elite samples are always small. Ericsson's group argued the replication used a different definition of deliberate practice [21].

Both roads lead to practice

Passion feeds practice. In studies of athletes, both harmonious and obsessive passion led to more deliberate practice, which in turn led to better performance [22]. So intensity matters. It just does not have to be the compulsive kind to get you there.

What about grit?

Grit, defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals", became famous after studies of West Point cadets and spelling bee finalists, where it explained on average about 4% of the variance in success [23]. A later meta-analysis of 66,807 people found grit overlaps almost completely with the established personality trait of conscientiousness (ρ = .84). The perseverance part predicted academic performance (ρ = .26) much better than the consistency of interest part (ρ = .10), which is the part closest to staying obsessed with one thing [24]. Another analysis found grit matters more when people are genuinely passionate about the domain [25].

Find your passion, or develop it?

Advice to "follow your passion" assumes passions are out there waiting to be found. Research by Paul O'Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton suggests this belief has costs [26]. People who saw interests as fixed and found were less interested in areas outside their existing ones, expected a true passion to provide endless motivation, and lost interest faster when a new topic became difficult. Seeing passion as something you develop fits the evidence better.

How others motivate you matters too. A meta-analysis of 128 experiments found that expected tangible rewards for doing an enjoyable task reduced people's intrinsic motivation, while informative positive feedback increased it [27]. The size and generality of this effect is still debated, but the direction is a useful warning for parents, coaches and managers.

The costs of too much

Workaholism is not engagement

In a study of 587 managers, workaholism, burnout and engagement turned out to be three distinct states [28]. A meta-analysis found workaholism goes with burnout, job stress, conflict between work and the rest of life, and poorer physical and mental health [29]. Being absorbed in work can be healthy engagement or a compulsion. The difference is whether you can switch it off.

More hours, less output per hour

Economist John Pencavel re-analysed data from British munitions factories during the First World War [30]. Up to about 49 hours a week, output rose in step with hours. Beyond that, each extra hour added less. Output peaked at about 63 hours, and 70 hours produced little more than 56. Losing the weekly day off cut output by about 10% at the same weekly hours. This was physical factory work a century ago, so the exact numbers should not be applied directly to creative work. The pattern of diminishing returns is the point.

Long hours and health

The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization estimated that in 2016, 488 million people worked 55 or more hours a week, and that 745,194 deaths from stroke and heart disease were attributable to those long hours [31].

How much does working 55 or more hours a week raise health risks?

Relative risk compared with working 35 to 40 hours. 1.00 = no difference.

Stroke (new cases)1.35×

Heart disease deaths1.17×

Heart disease (new cases)1.13×

Sources: Descatha et al., 2020 [32]; Li et al., 2020 [33]. Working 41 to 48 hours showed no clear excess stroke risk.

These figures are population averages for paid work and come from observational data, so they cannot prove that long hours alone cause harm. But it is striking that the productivity ceiling and the health threshold sit in roughly the same place.

Recovery

Mentally switching off from work in your free time, called psychological detachment [35], goes with less exhaustion, better wellbeing, better sleep and even better task performance [34]. People who invest heavily in their work detach less, so they have to plan it on purpose. One interesting wrinkle: detachment was linked to slightly lower creativity, perhaps because ideas sometimes keep incubating in the background.

Throwing good effort after bad

In a classic experiment, business students who felt personally responsible for a losing investment decision put even more money into it [36]. A meta-analysis confirms that this escalation of commitment is a reliable pattern [37]. Combine it with the rigid persistence of obsessive passion and you have a recipe for staying in a failing project far too long.

When the activity is your whole identity

When athletes leave sport, a narrow, exclusive athletic identity is one of the factors most often linked to poorer mental health during the transition [38, 39]. The more of yourself you put in one basket, the harder it is when the basket is taken away, through injury, failure, retirement or a company shutting down.

Survivorship bias: why obsession looks like the secret

Most stories about obsessive geniuses are told about people who succeeded. We rarely hear about the many people who were equally obsessive and did not. When you only study the winners, any trait they share, including obsession, looks like the cause of winning. This is survivorship bias.

A related idea from research on creativity: across careers, the share of a person's work that becomes a big hit tends not to depend on how much they produce. People who produce more have more hits, but not a higher hit rate [40]. Later analyses suggest this "equal odds" pattern does not hold perfectly in every dataset [41], but the practical lesson is robust: volume of attempts raises your number of successes. That is an argument for sustained, steady output, which harmonious passion supports at least as well as obsessive passion does.

What about the idea that mental illness fuels genius? In Swedish population registers, people with bipolar disorder were modestly over-represented in creative occupations [42]. But apart from bipolar disorder, people in creative professions were not more likely to have the other disorders studied [43]. Holding a creative job is not the same as being creative, and a modest association does not mean illness drives achievement.

Intensity without the damage

Aim for harmonious, not obsessive, engagementModerate evidence
Ask "can I stop when I choose to?" Harmonious passion links to practice just as well, with far better wellbeing and less burnout [6, 7].
Keep your self-worth separate from the workModerate evidence
Obsessive passion grows when self-esteem or approval is attached to the activity [1, 5]. You are more than your output.
If you coach, parent or manage, support autonomyModerate evidence
Autonomy support predicts harmonious passion [5]. Use informative feedback rather than tangible rewards for things people already enjoy [27].
Treat 55+ hours a week as a health hazard, not a badgeStrong evidence
Higher stroke and heart disease risk is well documented [32, 33, 31]. The output ceiling evidence is weaker but points the same way [30].
Protect at least one full rest dayWeak or early evidence
Losing the weekly rest day cost about 10% of output in one large historical dataset [30].
Switch off on purposeModerate evidence
Detachment goes with less exhaustion, better sleep and better performance [34]. Schedule it, because intense people do it least.
Make practice deliberate, and expect diminishing returns at the topStrong evidence
Practice matters most in predictable domains and much less elsewhere [18, 19]. Hours alone are not the goal.
Develop interests instead of waiting to find themModerate evidence
Expect new interests to get hard, and keep going through that phase [26].
Invite flow with matched challenge and clear goalsModerate evidence
Do not chase it as a performance hack, since its causal role is unproven [14, 15].
Set stop rules before you startModerate evidence
Decide in advance what result would make you quit or pivot, and have someone else review it. Escalation is strongest when you feel personally responsible [36, 37].
Build more than one identityModerate evidence
An exclusive identity makes transitions harder [39, 38]. Keep friendships, interests and roles outside your main pursuit.
In creative work, make more attemptsModerate evidence
More output means more hits, not a better hit rate [40]. Ship, then improve.

Myths and what the evidence says

Practice explains a meaningful minority of performance in games, music and sport (about 20% to 24%), about 5% in education and 1% in professions [18], and 1% among elite athletes [19]. The original violin finding did not hold up in a careful replication [20]. Practice is necessary, not sufficient, and no number of hours is magic.

Believing passions are found rather than developed narrows what you explore and makes interest collapse when things get hard [26]. Develop your passion instead.

Both kinds of passion lead to practice about equally, and neither reliably predicts objective performance once their overlap is removed [6]. At work, obsessive passion's link to performance is not significant [7]. Much of the myth comes from survivorship bias.

Output flattened beyond about 49 hours a week and peaked around 63 in one historical dataset [30], and risks of stroke and heart disease rise above 55 hours [32, 33].

Workaholism, engagement and burnout are distinct [28], and workaholism goes with poorer health and more conflict [29].

Grit overlaps almost completely with conscientiousness. Perseverance predicts performance; staying with the same interest barely does [24].

OCD involves unwanted, intrusive thoughts and anxiety-driven rituals [2]. Passion is something valued and chosen. They are different things.

Bipolar disorder is modestly over-represented in creative occupations, but most other disorders are not [42, 43]. An association in registry data does not show that illness drives achievement.

Flow and performance are correlated, but the direction of cause is unknown [15].

Check your understanding

Question 1 of 5

What best distinguishes harmonious from obsessive passion?

Question 2 of 5

Compared with harmonious passion, what does obsessive passion reliably add, according to the meta-analyses?

Question 3 of 5

After the 2018 correction, roughly how much of the variation in performance in professions does deliberate practice explain?

Question 4 of 5

What did the WWI munitions data show about long hours?

Question 5 of 5

Why do stories of obsessed geniuses overstate the role of obsession?

Answered 0 of 5. Pick an answer to see the explanation.

Words to know

Harmonious passion: Deep love for an activity that you engage in freely and can step away from.
Obsessive passion: Love for an activity tied to self-worth or pressure, so you feel compelled to keep going.
Rigid persistence: Continuing an activity even when conditions make continuing unwise.
Self-determination theory: The theory that people thrive when they feel autonomy, competence and connection.
Wanting versus liking: The brain's separate systems for craving something and enjoying it.
Reward prediction error: The gap between expected and actual reward, signalled by dopamine.
Flow: Total absorption in a task, most likely when challenge and skill are both high and matched.
Deliberate practice: Focused, effortful practice on specific weaknesses, ideally with feedback.
Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Overlaps heavily with conscientiousness.
Workaholism: A compulsive drive to work, distinct from healthy engagement.
Psychological detachment: Mentally switching off from work in your free time.
Escalation of commitment: Investing more in a failing course of action to justify earlier choices.
Survivorship bias: Drawing conclusions only from successes while ignoring similar failures.
Equal-odds rule: The finding that more output brings more hits, not a higher hit rate.
OCD: A clinical disorder of unwanted, intrusive thoughts and anxiety-driven rituals. Not the same as being passionate.

Sources

Every claim on this page links to one of these. Primary studies and meta-analyses carry the most weight; books and secondary sources are used for history and context.

1
Vallerand RJ, Blanchard C, Mageau GA, Koestner R, Ratelle C, Léonard M, Gagné M, Marsolais J (2003). Les passions de l'âme: on obsessive and harmonious passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85:756-767.
Primary studydoi:10.1037/0022-3514.85.4.756
Founding paper of the harmonious versus obsessive passion model, including the winter-cycling study.
2
Stein DJ, Costa DLC, Lochner C, Miguel EC, Reddy YCJ, et al. (2019). Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Nature Reviews Disease Primers 5:52.
Reviewdoi:10.1038/s41572-019-0102-3
Clinical definition of OCD; lifetime prevalence of about 2% to 3%.
3
Ruscio AM, Stein DJ, Chiu WT, Kessler RC (2010). The epidemiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Molecular Psychiatry 15:53-63.
Primary studydoi:10.1038/mp.2008.94
US lifetime OCD prevalence 2.3%, 12-month 1.2%.
4
Deci EL, Ryan RM (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry 11:227-268.
Reviewdoi:10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Self-determination theory: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
5
Mageau GA, Vallerand RJ, Charest J, Salvy SJ, Lacaille N, Bouffard T, Koestner R (2009). On the development of harmonious and obsessive passion. Journal of Personality 77:601-646.
Primary studydoi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2009.00559.x
Autonomy support predicts harmonious passion; pressure and over-valuation predict obsessive passion.
6
Curran T, Hill AP, Appleton PR, Vallerand RJ, Standage M (2015). The psychology of passion: a meta-analytical review of a decade of research on intrapersonal outcomes. Motivation and Emotion 39:631-655.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1007/s11031-015-9503-0
94 studies: how the two kinds of passion relate to wellbeing, practice and performance.
7
Pollack JM, Ho VT, O'Boyle EH, Kirkman BL (2020). Passion at work: a meta-analysis of individual work outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior 41:311-331.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1002/job.2434
N = 38,481: obsessive passion brings commitment and burnout risk but no reliable performance gain.
8
Vergauwe J, Wille B, De Caluwé E, De Fruyt F (2022). Passion for work: relationships with general and maladaptive personality traits and work-related outcomes. Personality and Individual Differences.
Primary studydoi:10.1016/j.paid.2021.111306
Argues obsessive passion is less adaptive rather than simply harmful.
9
Smith RW, Min H, Ng MA, Haynes NJ, Clark MA (2023). A content validation of work passion: was the passion ever there?. Journal of Business and Psychology 38:191-213.
Primary studydoi:10.1007/s10869-022-09807-1
Questions how well the standard passion scale measures what it claims.
10
Schultz W, Dayan P, Montague PR (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science 275:1593-1599.
Primary studydoi:10.1126/science.275.5306.1593
Dopamine neurons signal reward prediction errors.
11
Berridge KC, Robinson TE (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?. Brain Research Reviews 28:309-369.
Reviewdoi:10.1016/S0165-0173(98)00019-8
Dopamine drives wanting, not liking.
12
Berridge KC, Robinson TE (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist 71:670-679.
Reviewdoi:10.1037/amp0000059
Wanting can grow without liking growing too.
13
Csikszentmihalyi M (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
Book
The flow model for a general audience.
14
Fong CJ, Zaleski DJ, Leach JK (2015). The challenge-skill balance and antecedents of flow: a meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Positive Psychology 10:425-446.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1080/17439760.2014.967799
28 studies: a moderate link between challenge-skill balance and flow.
15
Harris DJ, Allen KL, Vine SJ, Wilson MR (2021). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the relationship between flow states and performance. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology 16:693-721.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1080/1750984X.2021.1929402
Flow and performance correlate at r = .31; which causes which is unknown.
16
Ericsson KA, Krampe RT, Tesch-Römer C (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review 100:363-406.
Primary studydoi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363
Origin of deliberate practice theory and of the later "10,000 hours" idea.
17
Macnamara BN, Hambrick DZ, Oswald FL (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis. Psychological Science 25:1608-1618.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1177/0956797614535810
How much performance practice explains, by domain (see the 2018 correction).
18
Psychological Science (corrigendum) (2018). Corrigendum: Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis. Psychological Science 29:1202-1204.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1177/0956797618769891
Corrected figures: games 24%, music 23%, sports 20%, education 5%, professions 1%.
19
Macnamara BN, Moreau D, Hambrick DZ (2016). The relationship between deliberate practice and performance in sports: a meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science 11:333-350.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1177/1745691616635591
Practice explains 18% of sport performance overall, 1% among elite athletes.
20
Macnamara BN, Maitra M (2019). The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993). Royal Society Open Science 6:190327.
Primary studydoi:10.1098/rsos.190327
Preregistered replication: the best violinists had not practised more than the good ones.
21
Ericsson KA, Harwell KW (2019). Deliberate practice and proposed limits on the effects of practice on the acquisition of expert performance: why the original definition matters and recommendations for future research. Frontiers in Psychology 10:2396.
Reviewdoi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02396
Ericsson's reply: critics used a looser definition of deliberate practice.
22
Vallerand RJ, Mageau GA, Elliot AJ, Dumais A, et al. (2008). Passion and performance attainment in sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise 9:373-392.
Primary studydoi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2007.05.003
Both kinds of passion lead to practice and from there to performance.
23
Duckworth AL, Peterson C, Matthews MD, Kelly DR (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92:1087-1101.
Primary studydoi:10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087
Introduced grit; it explained about 4% of variance in success outcomes.
24
Credé M, Tynan MC, Harms PD (2017). Much ado about grit: a meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113:492-511.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1037/pspp0000102
Grit overlaps heavily with conscientiousness; perseverance predicts better than consistency of interest.
25
Jachimowicz JM, Wihler A, Bailey ER, Galinsky AD (2018). Why grit requires perseverance and passion to positively predict performance. PNAS 115:9980-9985.
Primary studydoi:10.1073/pnas.1803561115
Grit predicts performance more where people are passionate about the domain.
26
O'Keefe PA, Dweck CS, Walton GM (2018). Implicit theories of interest: finding your passion or developing it?. Psychological Science 29:1653-1664.
Primary studydoi:10.1177/0956797618780643
Believing passions are found rather than developed narrows interests and weakens them under difficulty.
27
Deci EL, Koestner R, Ryan RM (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin 125:627-668.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627
Expected tangible rewards reduce intrinsic motivation; positive feedback increases it.
28
Schaufeli WB, Taris TW, van Rhenen W (2008). Workaholism, burnout, and work engagement: three of a kind or three different kinds of employee well-being?. Applied Psychology 57:173-203.
Primary studydoi:10.1111/j.1464-0597.2007.00285.x
Workaholism, burnout and engagement are distinct states.
29
Clark MA, Michel JS, Zhdanova L, Pui SY, Baltes BB (2016). All work and no play? A meta-analytic examination of the correlates and outcomes of workaholism. Journal of Management 42:1836-1873.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1177/0149206314522301
Workaholism is linked to burnout, stress, conflict and poorer health.
30
Pencavel J (2015). The productivity of working hours. The Economic Journal 125:2052-2076.
Primary studydoi:10.1111/ecoj.12166
In WWI munitions data, output flattens beyond about 49 hours and peaks near 63.
31
Pega F, Náfrádi B, Momen NC, Ujita Y, Streicher KN, Prüss-Üstün AM, et al. (2021). Global, regional, and national burdens of ischemic heart disease and stroke attributable to exposure to long working hours for 194 countries, 2000-2016. Environment International 154:106595.
Primary studydoi:10.1016/j.envint.2021.106595
WHO/ILO estimate: 745,194 deaths in 2016 linked to working 55+ hours a week.
32
Descatha A, Sembajwe G, Pega F, Ujita Y, et al. (2020). The effect of exposure to long working hours on stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis from the WHO/ILO Joint Estimates. Environment International 142:105746.
Meta-analysisdoi:10.1016/j.envint.2020.105746
Stroke risk 1.35 times higher at 55+ hours versus 35 to 40.
33
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Heart disease risk 1.13 (incidence) and 1.17 (deaths) times higher at 55+ hours.
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Wendsche J, Lohmann-Haislah A (2017). A meta-analysis on antecedents and outcomes of detachment from work. Frontiers in Psychology 7:2072.
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Switching off after work goes with less exhaustion and better sleep.
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Sonnentag S, Fritz C (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 12:204-221.
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Defines psychological detachment from work.
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Staw BM (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: a study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16:27-44.
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People responsible for a failing decision invest more in it.
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Sleesman DJ, Conlon DE, McNamara G, Miles JE (2012). Cleaning up the big muddy: a meta-analytic review of the determinants of escalation of commitment. Academy of Management Journal 55:541-562.
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What drives escalation of commitment.
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Park S, Lavallee D, Tod D (2013). Athletes' career transition out of sport: a systematic review. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology 6:22-53.
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126 studies on how athletes adjust to leaving sport.
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A narrow, exclusive athletic identity goes with poorer mental health in transitions.
40
Simonton DK (2003). Scientific creativity as constrained stochastic behavior: the integration of product, person, and process perspectives. Psychological Bulletin 129:475-494.
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The equal-odds rule: more output brings more hits, not a higher hit rate.
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Strict equal odds does not hold in every dataset.
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Kyaga S, Lichtenstein P, Boman M, Hultman C, Långström N, Landén M (2011). Creativity and mental disorder: family study of 300 000 people with severe mental disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry 199:373-379.
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Bipolar disorder modestly over-represented in creative occupations.
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Kyaga S, Landén M, Boman M, Hultman CM, Långström N, Lichtenstein P (2013). Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-year prospective total population study. Journal of Psychiatric Research 47:83-90.
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Apart from bipolar disorder, creative professions showed no higher rates of the disorders studied.