Quotes About Concentration

Maybe if I point to my brain it will work.

I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually.

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.

Steve Buscemi, in between takes, becomes like a clam. It's hard to get a word out of him. It's very funny.

One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.

The thing that sticks to me most about theater is that because it's such an ape crazy nonstop experience, you really don't have time to think about anything else. You're just really present; you have to be, or else, you know, you can't stop the play.

I play a lot of chess, just to a bog-average level. But I find it stimulates your mind with all the combinations of different moves.

Never rush through the stoke. Nervous or not, take your time, and the result is almost always better.

It's very hard to concentrate when your stomach's rumbling.

I'm a very emotional person. If I've got something on my mind, that would stop me from giving my best.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

No matter how fast or how slow you get to the quarterback, it all goes to slow motion when you get there. Everything just stops. You don't see anything but the quarterback. You don't hear anything but the quarterback's breath. It's almost like you're a shark. Your eyes get real big and everything's just quiet.

I have the strange ability to shut things out.

When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.

On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets. Every thought that arises is immediately and utterly true, every unexpected event is something you'd known all along but had only forgotten for a moment. A pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and over, a magnified anger at someone, is enough to fill your thoughts.

Focus is about controlling your behavior, so it becomes easier to do the right things, and harder to be distracted by the wrong things.

Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind at the same time.

Galm's tone was reserved, each of his words precisely enunciated, almost as if it required extra concentration for him to speak. He was thousands of years old, and I wondered if he was so ancient and powerful that he sometimes had difficulty remembering simple things, like how to use language.

When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, "My experience is what I agree to attend to.

1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law).

This is very similar to Derek Sivers's (page 184) "Don't be a donkey" rule. In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.

I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle, I have my mind inside the bicep when I do my curls. I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. I'm really inside, and it's like I gain a form of meditation, because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time.

Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something

many forms of meditation in the world. Like when I study and work really hard, where it takes the ultimate amount of concentration, I can only do it for 45 minutes, maybe an hour. "I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle, I have my mind inside the