Quotes About Focus

and old Indian saying: 'It's better to know one mountain than to climb many.

Playing the violin or writing a poem are special ways of paying attention. They are acts at once small and great. Although only one person can commit them, they require orderly marshallings of countless and diverse forces, something like the great landing of armies in Normandy, but incalculably bigger and more complicated.

We process information so efficiently that we don't dwell on thoughts and words anymore—we flit incoherently from one set of distractions to the next.

When what you're doing isn't just a means to an end, you're in no hurry to get it done.

But whatever we create on our typewriters, whenever we turn to them, we're choosing something that violates the digital Paradigm—something durable, intimate, focused, and self-sufficient.

We are not...wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.

But practice pares back the impossible

he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

auto-suggestion.

was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.

No matter what you do with the rest of your life, nothing will be as important to the future of the World as your work on this Project right now.

Teller prepared himself further at Compañia Hill: "I put on a pair of dark glasses. I pulled on a pair of heavy gloves. With both hands I pressed the welder's glass to my face, making sure no stray light could penetrate around it. I then looked straight at the aim point.

One place where I often see a positive focus and purpose is in the hardworking happiness of young mothers and fathers. Their new child becomes their one North Star, and they know very clearly why they are waking up each morning. This is the God Instinct, which we might just call the "need to adore." It is the need for one overarching focus, direction, and purpose in life, or what the Hebrew Scriptures describe as "one God before you" (Exodus 20:3).

The concern was about getting the beginning right, and then life and eternity would take care of themselves. We have been preoccupied with getting the end right, for some reason.

But it takes us much longer to discover "the task within the task," as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Because—and don't let anybody tell you different—novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.

Visualize Yourself Doing, Not Achieving.

High performers pick the shortest path to the right evidence to make decisions that matter.

Awareness is the first objective - not action and change.

The puzzle of performance becomes much simpler when the bar is visible each day.