Quotes About Focus

When we spent a day being fully present, we quickly discovered how much of the rest of our lives we weren't fully present.

because having too many options can easily lead to being stuck, disconnected from your life because there's no pressing need to do anything.

The first thing you have to do is throw yourself into whatever it is you're doing.

Sometimes we don't throw ourselves into it because we believe the small things are beneath us. What we don't understand is that what appear to be the small things are actually the big things. They're where it starts, and throwing yourself into them inevitably creates new opportunities for you.

Far too often, we don't start because we can't get our minds around the entire thing. We don't take the first step because we can't figure out the seventeenth step.

To do anything new—to do the 1—requires tremendous mental fortitude to not think about 2 or 3 yet. That time will come. And it is not now. Now is the time for 1. You start with 1. And you work on that. Just 1. And when 1 is done, you move to 2.

What is your 1? At any moment in the day, you can do only one thing at a time. And the more intentional you are about knowing what your 1 is, the more present you will be.

Our external environments mirror our internal lives. If your desk is cluttered, don't be surprised if you find it hard to focus. If your closet and garage are piled with stuff you don't use, don't be shocked when you are easily distracted. If things are lying around your living and working space that don't serve a clear purpose, don't be amazed that you aren't very calm and centered.

What we do with our attention, in short, is at the heart of what makes us human.

A hypereffective schedule designed to maximize productivity is, in fact, more likely to distract you from what's important than help you discover it.

You're never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don't stop thinking with your fingers

In dog obedience school we learned that if you want an undesirable behavior to go away, you stop paying attention to it.

We're simply trying to survive—and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what's possible.

Harshaw was working as hard as he ever worked. Most of his mind was occupied with watching pretty girls do pretty things with sun and water;

Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of single-minded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests.

Take your time and do it right, even if it takes another half second.

Find out what you want to do, then do it. Never talk yourself into doing something you don't want. Think

Maybe the whole world held together only when you kept your attention centered on it and believed in it. If you let discrepancies creep in, you began to doubt and it began to go to pieces.

Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes; when you have eliminated what you can't do, what remains is what you must do.

She often found herself caught in a rapture for minutes at a time, sometimes longer. But someone observed that she was never enraptured while she was cooking breakfast. If she were, she might burn it. Eternity can dovetail into our practical lives. It's possible for us to manage the toast and the rapture.

He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.

Is there some connection between waking up in the mystic sense, and learning to read (or to see paintings, say) in an alert, non-mechanical way? One Zen master, when asked what Zen is, always replied with the single word, Attention. What the hell did he mean?

The magician knows that in an information-overload situation, spectators only see what they came prepared to see.