Quotes About Focus

Your imagination is able to do all that you ask in proportion to the degree of your attention. All progress, all fulfillment of desire depend upon the control and concentration of your attention. Attention is attracted from without when you are consciously with the external impressions of the immediate present... Your attention is directed from within when you deliberately choose what you will be preoccupied with mentally.

If you don't have specific goals written down for your life, you are mentally malnourished. Your mind was designed to be fed with goals just as your body was designed to be fed with food and water.

Successful men and women train their minds to think only about what they want to happen in their lives.

When you know what you want and when you want it, you can always find a way to make it happen.

There is only one thing in the world that you have complete control over, and that is your thinking. If you don't deliberately give yourself positive directions, your mind and your body will continue to act upon directions from anywhere and everywhere,

Constantly remind yourself that every opportunity or activity is moving you either closer to the accomplishment of your goals or further away. The clock is always ticking. Nothing is neutral, and every single thing you do—or fail to do—counts!

Doers, on the other hand, act their way into feeling. After determining what needs to be done based on their goals, doers take action. They just do it. If they don't feel like taking action, they consider that emotion a distraction and take action in spite of it. They refuse to let their craving for short-term comfort divert them from their long-term goal and the blessings that go along with it.

You need to focus on reaching your goals rather than on the obstacles that stand in your way.

Now is now... There is nothing but now and I try to hold on to that. The past is gone, the future hasn't happened yet. This, right here, is all there is.

One should become the master of one's mind rather than let one's mind master him.

The whole boat had to be pointed towards the target.

Work occupied Napoleon entirely. He neither rested by day nor by night,

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

When our brain is overtaxed, we find "distractions more distracting.

research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started.

But except in rare circumstances, you can train until you're blue in the face and you'd never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time." What we're doing when we multitask "is learning to be skillful at a superficial level." The Roman philosopher Seneca May have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere.

The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.

never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.

Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.

When we're online, we're often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.

The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one. When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it's a mistake to assume that more is better.

Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere."51