If there was ever an upside to being OCD, it’s the inherent ability to focus all your attention on one task it comes with. I’m not suggesting I personally would have chosen to be obsessive compulsive if it were all possible to have that choice to make and I knew what each choice came with, but hey, if you have the condition you might as well make the most of some of its positive sides as well, right?

I guess this pretty much applies to every area of life. I mean we all have our demons, challenges, worries, skeletons — whatever you choose to call them and if there’s one thing life should have endeavoured to teach every last one of us it’s that you just have to find a way to deal with the challenges you face as best you can and that there is always but always a silver lining.

In my case and this time, I think I can speak for the majority of OCD ‘sufferers’ the silver lining to being obsessive compulsive is this ability to deploy the superpower of razor-sharp focus. You’re able to focus on a singular task and in effect go through every possible iteration associated with that task to come up with what I can confidently say is the very best way of completing that task. The downside to this of course (there’s always a downside) is that you often don’t choose which tasks you want to apply this laser-like focus to. Your mind seems to have a mind of its own and it dictates what you’re going to be focussing on…Imagine me spending two hours online, searching for a dictionary app that has the widest selection of words and synonyms available today and welcome to the world of OCD — particularly that part of it which dictates to you just what your razor-sharp focus is going to be applied to today…

It’s definitely not all bad however and dare I say I perhaps didn’t suggest that it’s all bad in any case. The best that you can do is try and channel your OCD and OCD can be a placeholder for anything in your life which is a challenge for you. You should try and channel that strong inclination and put it into something that can yield positive results in some way and as far as OCD goes, I know of a quite a few OCD sufferers who are extremely good at detecting patterns and working with numbers. So something like technical trading comes to mind as a good example of how OCD can be channelled into something positive and I actually know of a real-life example of how an OCD sufferer analysed financial data over a period of the preceding five to ten years, after which time he predicted the financial crisis of 2008, went “short” on a few stocks he identified to be headed for disaster and walked away from it all a very rich man!

We should all find an outlet through which to channel our inclinations to solve a specific problem we’re faced with, whether that “problem” is OCD (as is the case with me) or anything else.