Quotes About Focus

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes. Thus

Brother turned the page and read aloud again without once glancing down at the text.

Don't worry about the finish line. Don't question what you're doing. Just quiet your mind and keep up the pace.

Write the words The FIve Senses on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing.

people who are driven by something—or better yet, drawn irresistibly to a goal—do not count being tired as a bad thing.

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.

ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.

As the martial artist and actor Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.

The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.12

Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.

For leaders to get results they need all three kinds of focus. Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.

Stress makes people stupid." On

Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: "What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.

But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.

Whenever you notice your mind wandering," a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, "bring your mind back to its point of focus." The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.

Rapport demands joint attention—mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.

The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erving Goffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an "away," a gesture that tells another person "I'm not interested" in what's going on here and now.

In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5

Ten muy presente que tu enfoque determina tu realidad».

In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.

Some time is needed to grasp the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we are, the less we can cultivate the subtler forms of empathy and compassion.

Flow is a state devoid of emotional static, save for a compelling, highly motivating feeling of mild ecstasy.

If the heart wanders or is distracted," advised Francis de Sales (1567–1622), a Catholic saint, "bring it back to the point quite gently . . . and even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back . . . though it went away every time, your hour would be very well-employed.