Quotes About Focus

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life." [ Woman's Day magazine, March 12, 2002]

It was no surprise that her sewing was so uneven, for to make even stiches the seamstress herself had to be steady. Abigail tended to hunch over her patchwork, her fingers and thread a snarl, and sew a few stiches before abandoning it to look down the road towards the houses near the general store, or to get up for a drink of water.

If you desire one thing for so long, it's a given that you'll miss other things along the way. That's how it is… that's life.

Goals without deadlines aren't goals; they're merely directions.

Tethered to our smart phones, we are too caught up and distracted to take the time necessary to sort through complexity or to locate submerged purpose . In our urgent rush to get "there," we are going everywhere but being nowhere. Far too busy managing with transactive speed, we rarely step back to lead with transformative significance.

That's what happens when you're really concentrating. Time stands still. Time flies!

Beside the other two Wayland appeared clumsy, his shoulders almost too broad for the rest of his body, while he moved as clumsily as a bear too, tripping over things, knocking them down; except only when he was at work - and then his clumsiness like a bear's was also elegance; then each of his movements meshed in with the next, each of his muscles co-ordinated, the whole of him was focused to one end, like a sword towards the man it is killing. That end was perfection

I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present. They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything's fine. You can see that quite clearly in your interrogation exercise. What was it that chap told you? It's not the violence that breaks you. It's the threat of it. So why not just stay in the moment?

Ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness (living in the moment), and action. Who wouldn't, at certain points in their lives, benefit from kicking one or two of them up a notch? What was important was being able to turn them back down.

If you want to stop someone from remembering something, the key is to use distraction.

I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present.

Because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they're after.

He said that if you climb into the ring hell-bent on knocking the other chap into the middle of next week, chances are you're going to come unstuck. But if, on the other hand, you concentrate on winning the fight, simply focus on doing your job, well, you might just knock him into the middle of next week anyway.

Their analysis revealed that a number of psychopathic attributes were actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed criminals--attributes such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence, and focus--and the main difference between the groups was in the more "antisocial" aspects of the syndrome: the criminals' lawbreaking, physical aggression, and impulsivity dials were cranked up higher.

The goal was to center his mind on playing the shot at hand, rather than obsessing, at exactly the wrong moment, about the consequences.

People think [psychopaths] are just callous and without fear,' he says. 'But there is definitely something more going on. When emotions are their primary focus, we've seen that psychopathic individuals show a normal [emotional] response. But when focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely.

Yet anchoring your thoughts unswervingly in the present, focusing exclusively, immediately, on the here and now, is a cognitive discipline that both psychopathy and spiritual enlightenment have in common.

Oosthuizen's red spot is a classic example of what's known in sports psychology as a process goal--a technique by which the athlete is required to focus on something, however minor, to prevent them from thinking about other things: in Oosthuizen's case, all the ways he could possibly screw up the shot.

Because she was looking down and focusing her attention so precisely, Alice lost track of time and of herself. She wouldn't be able to put it into words, except to say she felt removed from the world. Or just at its edge. At the edge of the wild and beautiful world. She felt small, too. But part of something large. She was happy.

I've seen too many writers derail their creative process by stopping the action to tweak a word or a sentence. If you write a few paragraphs, then go back and polish them, you destroy all the forward momentum you had. It's like shifting gears—forward, reverse, forward, reverse. You could burn out your mental transmission. If you can train yourself to save the criticism for the second draft, you'll actually finish writing and have something to polish.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

Simon's insight is often reduced to "In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.

robust intelligence may be a liability—especially if by "intelligence" we mean our peculiar self-awareness, all our frantic loops of introspection and messy currents of self-consciousness. We want our self-driving car to be inhumanly focused on the road, not obsessing over an argument it had with the garage.

Looking ahead, focus on direction rather than destinations.Maintain the right direction and you'll arrive at where you want to go.