Quotes About Focus

The Computer Science Lab was a collection of engineers who weighed everything pitilessly against the question: How will this get us closer to our goal? They had committed themselves to developing Xerox's office of the future, and anything that diverted their attention or served an alternative goal had to be discarded or obliterated.

Coach said something to the effect of 'the only thing worse than running is not having something to run for.

Whatever you want to be in life, you're training for it right now.

A self-disciplined person defines success by effectiveness.

For two years nobody talked about anything other than the name arrangement. There was no fund-raising and no progress being made on construction and design.

In order to slip from beneath the crushing weight of future thoughts, I adopted a technique of focusing solely on the moment I was living. In itself, removed from the time line that stretched forward and backward from the present, no single moment was that bad.

By the time I was 8 years old, sports had pretty much taken over my life.

Sport is about acceleration, not top speed.

Be a duck, remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.

It's a lesson in life—don't look back, you'll trip over.

In a close-up, choose just one eye of the actor you're playing opposite, don't skip between the eyes or you will just look shifty;

I don't want to screw up today's work and tomorrow's worrying about yesterday's and I don't want to focus on what it looks like on the outside when the performance has to come from within me. I want to be in the moment now, getting it right from the inside.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.

You can work really hard, but if you're not training in the right way you're not going to improve and get to the level that you want to.

Michael Cole

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

It is important that I leave now to avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission of FEMA.

Don't run down your checklist. There is a tendency, even for senior leaders, to use meetings with a boss as an opportunity to run through your checklist of what you've been doing. Sometimes this is appropriate, but it is rarely what your boss needs or wants to hear. You should assume she wants to focus on the most important things you're trying to do and how she can help.

Aim for early wins in areas important to the boss. Whatever your own priorities, figure out what your boss cares about most. What are his priorities and goals, and how do your actions fit into this picture? Once you know, aim for early results in those areas. One good way is to focus on three things that are important to your boss and discuss what you're doing about them every time you interact.

What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face in the near future)? Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth? What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities? If you were me, what would you focus attention on?

you attract much more attention and a higher level of scrutiny than before.

In fact, as you will discover later, learning should be a primary focus of your plan for your first 30 days on the job (unless, of course, there is a disaster in progress).

They become overly fixated on wringing insights out of data that just aren't there, or setting up entirely new information systems, rather than focusing on the information at their disposal and what it really suggests about strategic priorities.