Quotes About Focus

If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours. But

You can share many aspects of intimacy—business, friendship, parenting, and sexual passion—only if you choose a single priority to the relationship and allow all the other activities to align themselves around your main purpose for being together.

But as you live your life with more and more true purpose, you won't accumulate so much tension during the day.

Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose.

It's not good to leave things of value behind. They nag at the mind and dis-tract one from the business at hand.

Le guerre sono belle, ma tendono a interferire con faccende più importanti.

That depends on your mind, Garion. The complexity of it lies in the complexity of the mind that puts it to use. Quite obviously, it can't do something that can't be imagined by the mind that focuses it. That was the purpose of our studies—to expand our minds so that we could use the power more fully.

En todas estas habilidades primero tenemos que aprender a «domar» nuestra mente y nuestras emociones. No podremos escuchar si nuestra mente divaga y nos impide concentrarnos. No podremos

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.

It is extremely difficult to stay alert & attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monolog inside your head.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get.

Insects all business all the time.

bilateral illusion of unilateral attention

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients' own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus.

boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

Life is life tennis: Those who serve best usually win.

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.