In Praise of Obsessive Men

One of my older brothers and I were very similar growing up. We were both good at school, both wore glasses, had similar colouring—unlike my other brother who was different. Yet there was one noticeable difference between my brother and me, which reflects a more general difference between the sexes. He was intensely and obsessively focused on whatever interested him at the time—to the exclusion of everything else, and I really mean everything else. I just wasn’t going to do this. I wanted to be “normal” and have a social life.

This sex difference is widely observed. Simon Baron Cohen points out in his book The Essential Difference that obsessive behaviour is common among autistic children, who are disproportionately male.

In the movie Rain Man, the autistic brother (played by Dustin Hoffman) is obsessed with statistics on airplane crashes. He knows crash statistics for all the airlines and is therefore only willing to fly on one, Qantas. A student once told me about the autistic man her church employed to police the church parking lot. He had memorized all the license plates of the cars that were allowed in the lot, and thus knew instantly when a car was parked there without permission, and even when a car was parked in the wrong space.

There is some evidence that this kind of intense, obsessive focus leads to extremely high-level achievement. Since males are more likely to display such focus, the high achievers tend to be male. One of my favorite examples relates to competitive Scrabble. Many women play Scrabble and are often better than their male counterparts. Yet the very highest levels of competitive Scrabble are dominated by men.

For example, the greatest competitive Scrabble player in history is Nigel Richards from New Zealand. He was World Champion in 2007, 2011, 2013, 2018 and 2019. He is a 15-time winner of the King’s Cup in Bangkok, the world’s biggest Scrabble competition. He also won the French World Scrabble Championship in 2015 and 2018, and the Spanish-language World Championship in 2024—despite not speaking those languages fluently beforehand.

Nigel Richards at a Scrabble tournament. Source.

How did he do this? Remarkably, he memorized whole dictionaries (not most people’s idea of a fun activity). But it illustrates the extraordinary intensity and obsessiveness that can produce exceptional achievement.

There is evidence that intense, obsessive focus produces extraordinary achievement in a variety of areas, not just Scrabble. There are the guitarists who spend hours playing guitar, the soccer players who are always at the training ground, the painters who spend all their time painting, the gamers who are never away from their console, and so on.

There is also anecdotal evidence that extraordinary scientific achievements come from people who are intensely and obsessively focused on what they do. In the divorce announcement in a local paper, the ex-wife of legendary physicist Richard Feynman complained that “her husband worked calculus problems all day, as soon as he arose, while he drove his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”

And the movie Oppenheimer popularized the story of when the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked to deliver a physics lecture in Dutch (a language he did not speak). He locked himself in a room with a Dutch grammar book for a month and a half, and then delivered the lecture in pretty much flawless Dutch.

High-achieving scientists also tend to have very high IQs, but my point is not simply about IQ. Although high-achievers in many academic fields are disproportionately likely to be men, this is not necessarily because men are smarter. The evidence suggests that average IQ for males is about the same or perhaps slightly higher than average IQ for females. There is also evidence of a higher variance among men, which means there are more males in the far right and far left tails of the distributions (“more geniuses and more idiots,” as E. O. Wilson once memorably put it).

My point is that high-achievers, including high-achieving scientists, are more likely to be male because men are more likely to focus obsessively on their area of interest, and this helps them to rise to the top. They are also more willing to pay the costs of such intensive and obsessive focus, such as having your wife divorce you in the case of Feynman, or repelling people because of your inattention to personal hygiene, which I have been told is not uncommon at some technical schools.

by Rosemary Hopcroft, Aphoria | Read more:
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[ed. Without conceding the point (see: Wikipedia: Women Achievers). So what? Men have different qualities than women (and vice versa). We should have more obsessives?]