The first week of July 1776 was a busy one for Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence, which he largely wrote, was adopted on the fourth. But he chose the same week to begin keeping a record of the temperature change in a notebook. This wasn’t a single example: for eight years, as president, Jefferson made detailed notes on the seasonal availability of various vegetables in the markets of Washington, DC.
This wasn’t because he couldn’t focus, says Joshua Kendall, author of America’s Obsessives (强迫症者): The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation. Rather, his obsessional habits were a self-soothing response to anxiety. When his wife died, he responded by cataloguing the tens of thousands of letters he’d sent or received. "A mind always employed is always happy," he liked to say. But that wasn’t a platitude (陈辞滥调): some of Jefferson’s compulsive industriousness made history, but all of it helped keep him mentally healthy.
The core of Kendall’s argument is that many successful people show symptoms of obsessive compulsive personality disorder (强迫型人格障碍). Steve Jobs would get angry over a misplaced comma; he rejected one version of the Apple Ⅱ computer because the lines on its internal circuit boards weren’t straight enough. But, if Kendall is correct, Jobs wasn’t a person consumed solely by his own ambition: he focused on shaping and perfecting the physical world just to avoid confronting his innermost self. Kendall quotes a psychiatrist who says it often begins with an insecure growing-up: "Children who have little control over the key events and people in their lives begin to focus on something they can control." Avoiding self-reflection, they make poor parents and partners. But their avoidance also leads to their Success.
This is disturbing, since the "experiential avoidance"—the effort not to feel certain feelings, or think certain thoughts—is widely considered as a bad thing. It’s blamed for everything from social anxiety to self-harm; the fast-developing acceptance and commitment therapy is dedicated to overcoming it, by helping people safely to "feel their feelings". Could it really bring benefits
The question strikes deep at how we think about psychological disorders. By definition, they interfere with life. But what counts as interfering is subjective: is it "better" to be a great innovator than an ordinary spouse, or vice versa The happiest among Kendall’s obsessives are those with self-awareness: they chose to embrace their obsessions, accepting the downsides. The tragic ones kept trying to make their relationships conform to their rigid demands. A Wired magazine cover last year asked readers, "Do you really want to be like Steve Jobs" In a work culture that increasingly uses "obsessive" as a compliment, it’s worth pausing to ask the question. What was the main reason for Thomas Jefferson being busy in the first week of July 1776