Quotes About Focus

Enter every activity without giving mental recognition to the possibility of defeat. Concentrate on your strengths, instead of your weaknesses… on your powers, instead of your problems."–

If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.

Goal setting is the most important aspect of all improvement and personal development plans. Confidence is important, determination is vital, certain personality traits contribute to success, but they all come into focus in goal setting.

Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.

Remember, you're allocating time to write, not finding time to write.

Equipment will never help you write a lot; only making a schedule and sticking to it will make you a productive writer.

Decide what you want to do," wrote William Zinsser. "Then decide to do it. Then do it" (Zinsser, 2001, p. 285).

Writing is more than typing words: Any action that is instrumental in completing a writing project counts as writing.

Put your "inner writer" back on its leash and give it a chew toy.

Binge writers are also binge readers and binge statisticians.

My college coach, Joe Paterno at Penn State, once told me to stop thinking so much. "Buckle your chin strap and hit somebody. Play fast and hard, and something good will happen. Don't be afraid to lose.

My desk was covered with little white telephone messages. Office confetti. You think the universe comes to a halt when you are locked into your own little world, but it doesn't. It goes on whether you're in trial or at war or under the surgeon's knife. Or dead.

Learning lines is on my mind until I do know them. I'll read the paper or paint the house to keep from starting to memorize. I've never found an easy way.

We begin to resemble what we focus on. If we devote our lives to our jobs, then we mentally take the office to our daughter's lacrosse game.

It will not compete. It demands top priority in the alcoholic's life.

Sobriety must come before everything else.

I knew I had to transform Alcoa... But you can't order people to change. That's not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

The past is the past. It's the present we should worry about.

Strong emotions serve only to slow effective action.

The armor separated him from the galaxy, from everyone, made him singular, freed him from the needs of the flesh, the concerns of the body that once had plagued him, and allowed him to focus solely on his relationship to the Force.

I always get very calm with baseball.

Only do what only you can do.

No doubt the Devil is busy tempting us and trying to distract us even when we attend Mass.