On Being Obsessive or Efficient

I was recently thinking about a dimension of intelligence and the mind that might have played a role in my school results of the past, and also my taste for computer programming. When you are taking an exam, careful management of your time might be a very good skill to possess, in the sense that if you are stuck on a given hard question, it might be preferable to rapidly switch on another one, with the goal of maximizing your overall exam grade, rather than completeness. But for some people, this, in itself, is difficult.

As I’m currently learning a new, difficult language (Farsi), I’m reminded of this dilemma, whenever I feel unease with not understanding a particular word. If I don’t try to control myself, I will stop everything and go look for the definition of that word right away. But for language learning, that is not a particularly good strategy, because very often it’s better to try to grasp the meaning at a higher level, for instance the level of the full sentence, or even paragraph or conversation you’re taking part into. But for an obsessive mind like mine, this is surprisingly difficult to do, and I need to consciously try to avoid that, in order to understand the language at a “higher level”, where surface details count less. When you succeed at operating at that level, the feeling of fluency can be much greater.

One area where this obsessive mindset can be a decisive advantage however is computer programming, where very often, solving and debugging a problem will feel like striking a very recalcitrant nail with a hammer. It’s true that sometimes you are doing it the wrong way, and stopping to change your strategy might be a better use of your time, but more often than not, because of the rigid and extremely precise nature of the computer, just repeatedly banging on a nail obsessively can be a very powerful ability in itself.