Quotes About Focus

was willing to make his best effort.

Thinking about averting plane crashes in 1935, or stopping infections of central lines in 2003, or rescuing drowning victims today, I realized that the key problem in each instance was essentially a simple one, despite the number of contributing factors.

The No. 2 pencils had been handed out. The timer had been started. But we had not even registered that the test had begun.

Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all. A

I tried to proceed deliberately, and not let panic take hold.

and loss of focus.

The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.

Surgeons are so absurdly ultraspecialized that when we joke about right ear surgeons and left ear surgeons, we have to check to be sure they don't exist

Effort does matter; diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you.

what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.

One has to decide whether one's fears or one's hopes are what should matter most. *

Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations.

I try not to think too far ahead. I don't think about next year. It's too depressing. I just think about next week.

But as your horizons contract—when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain—your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you. Carstensen gave her hypothesis the impenetrable name "socioemotional selectivity theory.

Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.

Operations like that lap chole have taught me how easily error can occur, but they've also showed me something else: effort does matter; diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you." .

What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen.

If you find you require willpower, you aren't ready to lose weight.

Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.

The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If

Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.

The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.

Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.

Psychologically, the choice to think or not is the choice to focus or not. Existentially, the choice to focus or not is the choice to be conscious or not. Metaphysically, the choice to be conscious or not is the choice of life or death.