Quotes About Concentration

Yoga is the mastery of the mind's fluctuations.

Concentration is uniting the mind with one place, object, or idea for spiritual awakening.

Grand Prix racer Jochen Rindt said simply that when he's racing, "You ignore everything and just concentrate. You forget about the rest of the world and become part of the car and track. It's a very special feeling. You're completely out of this world and completely into it. There's nothing like it.

I could not focus on any one subject for long because my mind was cotton candy, wisps and swirls and strands, without substance.

The noise kept up and did not stop. My head rang. I saw Shepherd take the chewing gum from his mouth, break it into two, and stick it in both ears. He kept working.

Why waste energy with wasted movements?] Very commonly, tightening and furrowing the brow while concentrating... Is the brain a muscle that works better by tensing the skull?

Relaxation is the key to speed and quicker reaction time.

When you're part of the pioneering effort, there's a focusing of an individual's concentration and level of attention that is at the exclusion of a lot of other things. It's kind of gun-barrel vision.

Energy follows attention. Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy of the system will go. "Energy follows attention" means that we need to shift our attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality.

It cannot be denied that primitive people are capable of concentrating upon things that interest them. If we try to give our attention to uninteresting matters, we soon notice how feeble our powers of concentration are. We ourselves, like them, are dependent upon emotional undercurrents.

This new thought was a turning-point in the development of my psychology. It meant that I gradually gave up following associations that led far away from the text of a dream. I chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself, believing that the latter expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say.

To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable.

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.

This, ultimately, is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology: To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time … it needs a lot of concentration … if you have a job administrating anything, you don't have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I'm irresponsible. I'm actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don't do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, "no," I tell them: I'm irresponsible.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. Knuth

First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it "deliberate," as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)