Quotes About Focus

More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.

Steve Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you've learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere

Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: "It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David.

If you need to listen to music while walking, don't walk; and please don't listen to music.

Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence?

The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.

you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything," he said.

Their focus becomes to play politics

that he felt proud of his sticking to his strategy for so long

Steve Jobs: «La gente pensa che essere concentrati significhi dire sì alla cosa sulla quale ci si deve focalizzare. Ma non è affatto così. Significa dire no ad altre cento buone idee. Dovete scegliere con cura. Di fatto io sono orgoglioso delle cose che non abbiamo fatto tanto quanto lo sono di quelle che ho fatto. Innovazione significa dire no a mille cose».

Out of sight, out of mind: we harbor a natural, even physical, scorn of the abstract.

we need to shift some of our worries to bigger things.

that really successful people say no to almost everything

The work itself was a secondary consideration.

via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition

best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.

via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by additionfn1).

focusing, rather, on the precise and vivid events that easily come to our minds.