How much value you deliver onto the world is a function of how obsessed you get in your area of interest. How obsessed you go about it is a function of how intense your interest is in a problem space.

Therefore everything hinges on the volume of something I shall call interest coverage.

An interest coverage might be shaped like a T. A jack of all trades has a fat and short T; a master-of-one has a thin and tall T. A fatally depressed person has no interest coverage to speak of.

Anyone engaging in nurturing another human tends discover quickly how mysterious it is an area of interest develops in a person. There can be no explanation about how a young person come to be interested in something and not others. Changing the interest coverage of another person is only as feasible as the degree of tyranny you adopt.

Parents tend to take the discovery approach with kids, subjecting them to a dozen co-curricular activities and see what sticks. But that's not the same thing is a targeted approach.

Given how influential this whole business can be, there's a few questions that don't get asked often enough.

How much of interest coverage is self-determined? How much control do you have in choosing your area of interests? If at first you're not interested in the intricate details of marine biology, are there techniques to stoke your interest the way drugs are injected? Like snorting knowledge-cocaine?

Suppose it's possible to any degree, how much plasticity is there for increasing interest coverage throughout a lifetime? Must interest coverage dwindle by 78?

Most discussions about this topic invariably bring up curiosity. I think curiosity is a lagging indicator. It's a symptom of having developed an obsession. You can be mildly curious about something but not acquiring enough escape velocity to turn it into an obsession.

Flow is the most hopeful framework I can think of but it probably isn't a complete answer. The idea is to engage in something while staying in the zone. You do that by maintaining a skill:challenge ratio of 1.0:1.1. This is what makes gamification of anything so effective.

Still, under the best circumstances I can only handle so much of learning music theory before I tap out (something I have no interest for). But it could simply mean no one has designed a good enough game for learning music theory.

Flow is good enough to let your mind stay the course in developing an obsession, but it doesn't spark it. So what does the sparking? By the right questions; and all questions are the derivative of only three major category of questions:

1. How do I master this?
2. How do I thrive?
3. How do I get seen?

As I came up with these, I realize they map cleanly to these three root motivations:

1. Power
2. Money
3. Fame

Now I'm embarrassed I've come this far just to make such basic revelations.

Taking this point, it could either mean it's tragic that something as pure as curiosity couldn't rise above such tainted desires; or it could mean it's an actionable idea in the right hands.