The pattern keeps repeating.

Talking to CS students from good universities, good grades, disciplined enough to show up every day. They apply for jobs, keep applying, and nothing happens. Not a callback, not a rejection. Just silence.

You can blame the economy. The German job market is rough right now, Europe too, and AI is genuinely displacing a lot of junior work. Those are real factors.

But when you look at what the students who do get hired actually have in common, it’s not their GPA. It’s not which university they went to. It’s one thing: they are obsessed with their craft.

why obsession beats discipline

Discipline is forcing yourself to do the thing. You open the laptop because you told yourself you would. You do the hour of study because it’s on the calendar.

Obsession is different. You open the laptop because you want to. You go down a rabbit hole on Kubernetes networking at 11pm not because it’s on a study plan but because you’re genuinely curious how it works. You watch old conference talks for fun. You know things that don’t matter to your day job yet, because you find them interesting.

The two boxers example makes this concrete.

Two boxers, same talent, same coach, same genetics. Both want to be world champions. One goes to training, works hard, does everything required. The other does exactly the same thing. But when they get home, they put on old fights from the 1960s and 1970s. They study how the great ones moved, set up knockouts, defended their hands. They know names and details that seem completely unnecessary.

Both can become champions. But only one can become an all-time great.

Look at Terence Crawford, Andre Ward, Shakur Stevenson. They’re not nerds in the traditional sense. They’re well-dressed, well-spoken, successful. But they are obsessed with boxing. They study it as a complete system. That’s what separates them from everyone else who’s also talented and disciplined.

The same principle applies to CS careers.

how obsession actually develops

You can’t jump from zero to obsessed. It doesn’t work that way.

The good news: obsession and competence feed each other. The more time you put in, the better you get. The better you get, the more interesting it becomes. The more interesting it becomes, the more time you put in.

So the path to obsession starts with just doing the work. Following a direction, putting in consistent hours, building things. You’ll hit a point where it stops feeling like discipline and starts feeling like genuine interest.

Three things accelerate this:

1. Start from a place of direction. You can’t get obsessed with something vague. “I want to work in tech” won’t do it. “I want to become a DevOps engineer who can build and operate Kubernetes clusters” gives obsession somewhere to attach. Know what you’re trying to become.

2. Curate your media environment. What you consume shapes what you think about. If your YouTube feed is gaming and random entertainment, that’s where your brain goes in idle moments. If it’s channels like Made by GPS, Misha Vandenberg, and people building in the DevOps and AI space, your brain starts going there instead.

Subscribe to five to ten channels in your niche. Watch their latest videos. Read blogs. Listen to podcasts when you’re walking. Let the content pull your attention toward what matters.

3. Go one level deeper than you need to. Don’t just learn how to deploy to Kubernetes. Understand how Kubernetes actually works. What are the core control plane components? How does scheduling happen? What does etcd actually store?

None of this is required to do your job right now. But each piece of “unnecessary” knowledge compounds. A deep fact about Kubernetes networking, one about Linux syscalls, one about how TCP handshakes work at the wire level. These small things add up to someone who thinks about systems differently.

The trap here: don’t go infinitely deep on something irrelevant. You can’t get obsessed with Vim and forget to learn Kubernetes. The goal is one level deeper in things that actually matter to your craft, not bottomless rabbit holes on tools you’ll use for five minutes.

being a nerd without being a nerd

This is the thing most people miss.

Crawford and Ward and Stevenson don’t look like nerds. They’re physically imposing, articulate, socially present, successful. But internally they’re completely obsessed with one domain.

That’s the model. A T-shaped person. Deep in one area (DevOps, infrastructure, AI), with a real baseline in everything else that makes you a functional human being.

What “everything else” actually means:

Mental health. Not in a therapy-buzzword way. Just: sleep, exercise, reduced doom scrolling, enough sunlight. If your baseline feels broken, nothing else compounds the way it should.

Social skills. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is still the best practical book on this. You don’t have to be an extrovert. But you can’t be completely unable to talk to people. Basic social function is non-negotiable in a career.

Deep work. Cal Newport’s book Deep Work is a manual for staying focused in a world designed to destroy your attention. If you want to do hard technical work, you have to protect your ability to think for long uninterrupted stretches.

Train. Almost every day if you can. The mental clarity and physical presence that comes from consistent training changes how people perceive you, and how you perceive yourself.

These aren’t extras. They’re what keep the obsession sustainable and make you someone people actually want to work with.

the practical version

Do the technical work every day. Even 20 minutes. Build something.

Fill your media environment with content about what you want to become.

When you hit an interesting edge case or concept, go one level deeper than you have to. Take notes.

Work on the basics of being a good human in parallel: health, relationships, focus, physical presence.

The students who get hired aren’t doing anything magical. They’re the ones who genuinely like this stuff, who can’t help but go deeper on it, and who’ve built a life that makes sustained obsession possible.

The free CareerLaunch challenge on Skool is built around this. Apply if you want the structured path.