WORKS by Paul Kamani
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Super Interest

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Learning Achievement Psychology
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A secret for high achievement.

Interest is a rewarding feeling of wanting to know more about something. Interest is associated with learning. You cannot become interested in something you already know everything about. It is intrinsically rewarding, so you feel joy and happiness as you uncover more knowledge about the subject.

Interest is a catalyst for behaviours such as focus, concentration, and energy.

You have probably been there: you came across a topic and find yourself hooked.

Cognitive effects

  • You experience an intensified cognitive focus and curiosity to the point where you lose track of your bodily sensations, such as sleep, hunger, time, and your surroundings.
  • You start investigating, asking a lot of why, how, and what questions, prompting you to dive deeper.
  • You start connecting ideas from diverse fields, linking old and new knowledge.
  • You voluntarily persist through the difficult and boring aspects of the subject. You don’t need to be incentivised with good grades or coerced by responsibility; your motivation is automatic.

Behavioural effects

  • You dedicate more time and energy to that subject to the extent that you develop new routines and habits. Sometimes, even weird and unconventional habits.
  • You annoy your friends by constantly bringing it up as a topic to discuss; you take this further by looking for people you can discuss these ideas with and feel at home among them.

Emotional effects

  • You feel happy and excited, and you experience enjoyment as you engage with that subject.
  • You might find it hard to get the topic out of your mind. Ideas come to you even at odd times, like in the shower.
  • You tolerate uncertainty and mystery about what you do not know yet, and joyfully await the chance to learn it.

Consequently, you learn way faster and deeper than others.

The issue is that while interest creates momentum, like every other feeling, it is temporary. You feel it today for a topic and tomorrow for another. You can hardly develop a substantial understanding of any field with short-term interest. To really achieve anything meaningful, you must sustain this feeling for months and years. That is what I refer to as Super Interest.

Super Interest is a strong feeling of interest in an endeavour, sustained for a long period of time.

I recall my first year in web development. I got deeply interested in the discipline when I manipulated the DOM (anything you see when you open a website) with JavaScript. I could not get the thought of the newfound possibilities out of my mind. I easily developed a routine of coding 4-5 hours a day for more than 8 months. I got so interested that I once spent 48 hours without sleep trying to finalise a web application. It was not like I felt sleepy and had to be disciplined. No, I was so interested in what I was doing that I didn’t even feel sleepy.

I wouldn’t even say I had to be so disciplined; I simply enjoyed doing the stuff.

  • If Interest makes you jump out of bed in the morning and rush to your work table, then Super Interest makes you do this long enough to do something meaningful.
  • If Interest makes you talk about a subject, Super Interest keeps you talking to a following.
  • If Interest makes you read and think about a subject, Super Interest sustains you to a point where others look up to you for guidance.

How then can you develop a Super Interest in a subject? Or to put the same question in practical maintenance form How do you not lose Interest in a subject?

I will leave you to the thinking and the experiment. Feel free to send me any insights you uncover (I want to develop a Super Interest in topics I think might be important for our species). Eventually, I will write the follow-up to this post. And I genuinely hope it will be written from the depths of experience.