Quotes About Focus

too much detail can have a distancing effect

A Hun without a purpose will never know when he has achieved it.

There is no use in trying to judge everything but the condition you are in right now. You are absolutely delusional if you think that you know anything right now.

Play the game without mercy, play to win

I Don't Have Time For Both A Wife And An Airplane.

Don't let me think.

Open your eyes, boy. Your eyes. Open your eyes and no more turn aside and brood.

Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it.

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day

One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.

controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.

all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy.

Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to racing motorcycles—and

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. Memory

Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. The analogy goes deep. Your use of electricity depends on what you choose to do, whether to light a room or toast a piece of bread. When you turn on a bulb or a toaster, it draws the energy it needs but no more. Similarly, we decide what to do, but we have limited control over the effort of doing it.

flow - a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle; interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations.

Many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.

This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.

The bat-and-ball problem, the flowers syllogism, and the Michigan/Detroit problem have something in common. Failing these minitests appears to be, at least to some extent, a matter of insufficient motivation, not trying hard enough.

She did not forget about the meeting. She was completely focused on something else when the meeting was set and she just didn't hear you.