There is one TV show episode that changed millions of people’s lives.
Countless people have retold this scene and it’ll help you understand life and how to navigate it better than anything else can. The scene comes from the TV show Succession.
The main character Logan Roy is at a karaoke bar with his family. He takes them into a room to try and apologize for his past behavior in the hope his kids will stop blocking his massive multibillion-dollar GoJo business acquisition.
The kids don’t buy the apology for a second.
Logan realizes he has completely lost his emotional leverage and ability to manipulate his kids. As he stands up to leave, he pauses at the door, looks back at them, and delivers the ultimate, cold-blooded patriarchal verdict:
“You’re flaring up. You’re talking about things you don’t understand. I love you, but you are not serious people.”
This line hits his kids at the core because, despite all their expensive suits, corporate vocabulary, and high-stakes maneuvering, Logan sees right through them.
He views them as fragile, privileged children playing at a game they aren’t hardened enough to survive.
This isn’t a fictional idea. It’s the crux of modern life.
There are serious and unserious people. The problem is the unserious people are hard to detect because they look, talk, and dress like serious people. But they’re not.
The difference between serious and unserious people is obsession.
Amateurs will call obsession hustle culture because they imagine some Lambo bro with fake biceps telling them to work harder.
That’s not what obsession is.
Obsession has nothing to do with working hard because an obsessed person doesn’t see what they do as hard work. Their work doesn’t feel like work. Obsession is hard to describe, but I’d call it a way of life.
It’s an attitude. It’s a mantra. It’s a rebellion against normal. It’s a vaccine against ever becoming poor. It’s how you become a serious person.
To become a serious person you must go all in.
People delude themselves into believing they went all in, but then in the same sentence say things like “I’m busy” or “I didn’t meet XYZ commitment because my cat got sick.” You’ll never achieve anything notable by being half-assed.
People have goals but they then have the safety net of a job or a Plan B in case anything goes wrong. So they hedge their bets and treat every opportunity like a purchase with a refund policy that they fully intend to redeem.
Passion says to make your goal a side hustle. Obsession says to have one goal and do nothing else. Serious people choose the latter.
Robert Caro is the greatest political biographer to ever live.
Most people know him as the guy who won two Pulitzer Prizes. What they don’t know is the borderline psychotic, agonizing level of obsession he put into his work.
In the 1970s, Caro decided to write a definitive biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson. A normal journalist would spend a year interviewing politicians, read a few diaries, and pump out a 300-page book.
Not Caro.
Caro realized that to understand Johnson, he had to understand the dirt-poor, brutal Texas Hill Country that shaped him. He went to Texas and interviewed the locals, but they gave him guarded, polite, “unserious” tourist answers. They didn’t trust a city-slicker reporter from New York.
So, Caro did the most unreasonable thing possible. He quit his job, sold his home, packed up his wife, and moved to the middle of nowhere in Texas.
He lived there for 3 years. He slept on the ground in the Texas wilderness. He did chores for the locals. He forced himself to experience the isolating, soul-crushing silence of the land. Only then did the locals open up to him.
He didn’t just want facts. He wanted the truth.
Caro is now 90 years old. He has spent the last 55+ years writing one biography series (The Years of Lyndon Johnson). The final volume still isn’t finished.
His obsession manifests in rules that normal people would find torturous:
The Uniform: He goes to his small, barren office in New York every single day wearing a full suit and tie. There is no one there to see him. He does it purely to remind himself that he is doing “serious work.”
The Technology Ban: He refuses to use a computer. He types every single word of his massive, 1,000-page volumes on a mechanical Smith-Corona Electra 210 typewriter. If he changes a paragraph, he doesn’t cut and paste… he re-types the entire page from scratch.
The 7-Year Slog: A single chapter regarding how LBJ stole a Senate election in 1948 took Caro several years of daily, grueling research to write. He went through millions of documents page by page, long before digitization or AI.
Mainstream culture is obsessed with efficiency. We want AI summaries, 10-minute book breakdowns, and “fast content.” Robert Caro is the antidote to that entire worldview. He proves that scale requires sacrifice and obsession.
Caro refused to be normal. His books aren’t just biographies. They are the definitive texts on how political power actually functions in America. No one else could have written them because no one else was willing to ruin their life for it.
Caro spent his 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s obsessing over one man. He went completely broke writing his first masterpiece (The Power Broker), to the point where his wife had to sell their house while he was still writing it. He gave his entire existence to a typewriter and a dead president.
That is what going all in looks like. And it’s why Robert Caro will be remembered in history books and people will study his work for hundreds of years. The rewards of going all in and being serious are so great they’re almost unimaginable.
There is lived, and there is lived to the fullest beyond reasonable doubt. The latter category is one of the greatest feelings in the world.
This might sound insane but hear me out.
Being sane means you follow the traditional path, get told what to do, and earn a mediocre income that barely keeps up with inflation. The average person is fat, sick, drugged up on prescriptions, addicted to TV shows, watches too much sport, and drowns out uncomfortable feelings with alcohol and junk food.
Being “sane” in the modern world is actually the most insane thing you can do.
The opposite is to be a psycho. It’s to avoid being normal at all costs. It’s to ignore what people think of you. And it’s to realize that the answers you get from AI tools are based only on documented information, but the real wisdom and intelligence come from UNDOCUMENTED information.
If the information you’re consuming and relying on is publicly available, by nature, it’s average and will therefore make you average.
Avoid anything to do with being average.
Creator Mason Hughes says, “The people who call you insane are describing the exact gap between you and them.”
Take it as a compliment. F*ck, take a bow and enjoy the praise. It’s the highest form of flattery in existence. What people think of you doesn’t matter. Their opinion of you is a reflection of their own insecurities. Them calling you insane says more about them than it does about you.
You have to be a little insane to achieve anything worthwhile.
As cliché as it sounds, Apple founder Steve Jobs saw the same pattern in society when he said this:
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
I still get chills when I watch the old Apple TV ad that says this quote.
Not everyone agrees with me on this topic of obsession. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Critics responded to this essay idea on X with advice like:
“Relax, for f*ck’s sake.
“You only get one life. Don’t waste it chasing things that don’t matter.”
“Slow down. Enjoy your coffee. Watch the sunset. Call your parents. Spend time with your friends.”
“Be humble. Be kind. Be present. Let people call you unambitious. Let them think you’re missing out.”
“Contentment is the path. There’s no right or wrong. Whatever you choose, enjoy your life’s journey.”
This is some of the worst advice I’ve ever read.
Relaxing means settling for second best in this context. It means wasting time and thinking we’ll live beyond today. Not chasing things that don't matter does make sense. But the critics are applying it to the one thing that does matter — your obsession.
When you find something you’re willing to die for – something so rich, so powerful, so meaningful – it’s an obligation to chase it to the end of its logical conclusion because to do anything less is a waste of your life.
The part about slowing down is also meaningless. It’s an excuse to just be mediocre, not have goals, and just rely on luck and hope. That’s not a plan. It’s guaranteed failure. You can chase your obsession, drink coffee, and watch the sunsets. Sure. No worries, mate. But your personal life has nothing to do with obsession.
Everyone, including me, has a family. I care about my two daughters. Being obsessed, going all in, and doing work that doesn’t feel like work doesn’t change any of that. Again, people will do anything to find an excuse to avoid doing hard things.
As far as having people call me unambitious, no thank you. Being a drifter and a romantic artist is a nightmare. We don’t pay attention to unserious people. They just drift into the underbellies of society and get forgotten about, assuming they don’t die of alcoholism or a drug overdose.
It’s never a good idea to be unambitious because that’s just another name for lazy.
Ambitions are awesome even if they don’t come true. It’s better to have dreamed and failed than to have never dreamed at all. When critics say there is no right or wrong they’re deeply deluded. There is right or wrong.
If you become average and piss your life away, that’s 100% the wrong choice. No intelligent person would think any other way. Contentment is just an excuse to drown in comfort and accept constraints that don’t actually exist.
Our primal nature as humans is to make sure our life is worth something.
We’re motivated by meaning and a sense of mission – and just drifting through life without any of that is a low-performance mindset that’ll steal your time, energy, and money away so you’re stuck working for “the man” or “a man” fulfilling the role of, well, there’s no nice way to put it, a modern slave.
That’s what the default path buys you. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
Don’t screw it up by thinking being mediocre is some prize worth winning.
Have one clear focus. Go all in. Find work that doesn’t feel like work. Exert an insane amount of effort that looks illogical to a normie. Choose to be an outcast. Treat today as if you could be dead tomorrow. Have fun along the way. Let your way of being be the legacy you leave your family. Ignore the critics. Channel your inner Robert Caro.
The results from obsession are truly breathtaking, and if you discover them for yourself, you’ll feel like a born-again Christian spreading the gospel of obsession.
It’s the only sure path to getting everything you want in life and more. It’s the naughty secret everyone you look up to understands but no one speaks. Because if everyone was obsessed, there’d be actual competition. The fact most people aren’t obsessed is what eliminates 99.9% of competition, which is cool as hell.
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