What do these have in common? A lot more than you think. Over time, most people will eventually grow old and build expertise within a specialized field. Some better than others. That's OK. As we become smarter, more experienced, knowledgeable of that topic, we build tendencies that allow us to do our jobs more efficiently or enjoy ourselves. It becomes an automatic process of refinement and optimization. It becomes a game. Let's refer to the examples above: Many people believe that the stock market is an advanced form of gambling, but there is a lot more to it: financial analysis, market and product values, speculations, etc. It has been shown, however, that simply throwing darts at a stock versus advanced background knowledge have not yielded very different results in all instances, but the calculated risk assessment can most certainly be made prior to investing to help minimize utter failure. That being said, the rules of the stock market game get more and more intense the more you learn about it. Intricacies develop between you and the rules, where you tweak little things to maximize your 'winning of the game'. For example, in the stock market, you may shift your investment in a conservative selection of energy companies to a riskier one based on a hunch. Pitching a baseball has a lot more to it than what is seen at first glance as well. Sure, anyone can throw a baseball 60 feet. Well, almost anyone. And if you do it a few times, you can probably get decent enough to throw it where you want - over the plate, a little to the left, a little to the right, etc. Even better, you can get good enough to throw it how you want - spinning it to the left, spinning it to the right, no spin at all, etc. Like stock analysis and trading, pitching intricacies take over. As a pitcher, you know that, for example, loosening your wrist at just the right angle will throw a cut-fastball. Then you try to perfect that motion. You even go so far as to create variations of that cut-fastball, and try to perfect the variations. Hypothetically, say you're in a game, and you throw cut-fastball-B to their #3 batter, and he strikes out. When you next see him at the plate, do you throw him the same pitch order to trick him in a similar way? Do you mix it up? Your call. You are now playing the game within the game. And you're addicted to it.** Tweeting or blogging or facebooking are just like the prior two examples. You guys know the rules: write something, follow people, other people follow you back. The rules are set for this game. Optimization: How do I write better tweets? How do I follow better people? How do I get people to follow me? How do I get stars? How do I get retweeted? It started off simply - you write what's on your mind or maybe what you're doing. But, then you start to get feedback in ways mentioned above. Now, in the back of your brain, you become addicted to optimizing the return on this feedback. So, in turn, you change your intentions when you write things. Yea, you're still writing things, but for what reason? All of a sudden, it's not so simple anymore.
In the long run, as you learn more about a process, you develop alternative methods to optimize yourself and yield intended results. The thing is: those goals change over time.
Many times, intentions change to fill a void in one's life: money (oh, I can make money doing this?), love or lust (why is she 'all of a sudden' talking to me?), etc. Other times it might be situational (see the 7 deadly sins). And, other times, a logical change in goal has been made, and one can then shift his mentality and intentions to reaching that goal. It's just a matter of pointing it out, knowing what you really want, and going for it.
** Sidebar on addiction -- I don't think all forms of addiction are bad. I believe that addiction has this general "negative overtone" associated with it. You'll may hear, "Bob watches so many movies! He's addicted!" Well, whoever is making that claim may not necessarily understand why Bob watches movies. He may work 80 hours a week, and movies are his downtime. He may be a movie critic and writes in blogs. Or, he may legitimately be anti-social and can only associate with movie characters, in a negative way. My point is - addiction is a good thing when used in a good way. End sidebar.
