Quotes About Focus

One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.

The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention.

To pursue mental operations to any depth, a person has to learn to concentrate attention. Without focus, consciousness is in a state of chaos.

After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have sustained the hard work, the 'perspiration.' Curiosity and drive are in many ways the yin and the yang that need to be combined in order to achieve something new.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.

The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer.

The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings."--(psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls "flow")

To be distracted against one's will is the surest sign that one is not in control.

Among the many intellectual pursuits available, reading is currently perhaps the most often mentioned flow activity around the world. Solving

Thus we might think of consciousness as intentionally ordered information. This

Because optimal experience depends on the ability to control what happens in consciousness moment by moment, each person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual efforts and creativity.

it is difficult to ignore challenges once one is aware that they exist.

If goals are well chosen, and if we have the courage to abide by them despite opposition, we shall be so focused on the actions and events around us that we won't have the time to be unhappy.

Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget their initial purpose in scholarship. In

We have seen earlier that when an activity is thoroughly engrossing, there is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli. One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self.

Even pain is better than the chaos that seeps into an unfocused mind. Hurting oneself, whether physically or emotionally, ensures that attention can be focused on something that, although painful, is at least controllable—since we are the ones causing it.

Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos.

to impose order in consciousness through the performance of patterned action.

Every relationship requires a reorienting of attention, a repositioning of goals.

When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly.

Inner conflict is the result of competing claims on attention.

They are situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve a person's goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against. We have called this state the flow experience, [...] and those who attain it develop a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy has been invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen to pursue.

Flow" is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.

Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life either rich or miserable.