Quotes About Focus

The typical answer is "I study four hours a day.

You can't get good at something if you are working twenty hours a day. In fact, something is very wrong in your life if that is how much you are working at one thing.

I ignore the headlines. Italy is a nice place to eat dinner and sight see but I'm not going to ever think again about their debt.

So here's the solution and it works and can be applied at any age: get good at three, four, or five things. Then find the intersection. Then become the best in the world at the intersection. That's how you can pretend to do your special purpose.

What can I do right now to move forward, in this second?

It's important to realize that what's most important is paying attention to the things that are not important.

You can't get good at something if you are working 20 hours a day. In fact, something is very wrong in your life if that is how much you are working at ONE thing.

Money, iit turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of otherthings if you did.

The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.) When

A true BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals) is clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People get it right away; it takes little or no explanation.

but is simplicity enough?

The good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.

The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.

If you're diversified into five businesses, as we once were, the businesses that only make up 3% of your sales are going to take 20% of your time, energy, and attention. It's just not worth it. Focus. Do what you do better than anyone else. And the results will probably be very positive, as they were for us once we decided to concentrate all our efforts on one line of business.

businesses. We will not make unrelated acquisitions. We will not do unrelated joint ventures. If it doesn't fit, we don't do it. Period.

The challenge becomes not opportunity creation, but opportunity selection.

It takes discipline to say "No, thank you" to big opportunities.

You don't get a chance to adjust and finagle, and decide that you really didn't intend to do that anyway, and readjust your objectives to make yourself look better. You never just focus on what you've accomplished for the year; you focus on what you've accomplished relative to exactly what you said you were going to accomplish—no matter how tough the measure. That was a discipline learned at Abbott, and that we carried into Amgen.3

It requires the discipline to say, "Just because we are good at it—just because we're making money and generating growth—doesn't necessarily mean we can become the best at it." The good-to-great companies understood that doing what you are good at will only make you good; focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.

If you spend your life keeping your options open, that's exactly what you'll do . . . spend your life keeping your options open.

Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.

circles and getting rid of everything else.

Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action, fanatically consistent with the three circles.

The best BHAGs make you think big. They force you to engage in both long-term building and short-term intensity. The only way to achieve a BHAG is with a relentless sense of urgency, day after day, week after week, month after month, for years. What do you need to do today, with monomaniacal focus, and tomorrow and the next day and the day after that to defy the probabilities and ultimately achieve your BHAG?