Quotes About Focus

Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced.

What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.

Driven by this insight, while my classmates contemplated their true calling, I went seeking opportunities to master rare skills that would yield big rewards.

Writing a letter to yourself is an excellent mechanism for generating exactly this type of solitude. It not only frees you from outside inputs but also provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to sort and organize your thinking. Not surprisingly, I'm not the only person to discover this particular solitude hack.

the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted "Think Weeks" twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.

When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you'll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.

resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.

we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

Según declaran los autores de The 4 Disciplines of Execution, «cuanto más queremos abarcar, menos logramos hacer».

As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, "The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish." They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals." This simplicity will help focus an organization's energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results

The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.

In the preceding discipline, I argued that for an individual focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles,

This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about "other people, yourself, or both.

I decided that focusing my attention on a bottom-up understanding of my own field's most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing my career capital stores. To

be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.

First, it allowed me to connect, at a visceral level, accumulated deep work hours and tangible results. Second, it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of deep work were needed per result. This reality (which was larger than I first assumed) helped spur me to squeeze more such hours into each week.

I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.