Focus Quotes

If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.

~ David Halberstam

I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.

~ C.s. Lewis

Relax, refresh and refocus.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Life is simple. It is meant to be lived. Don't over-complicate things. Don't lose your life in the things that don't matter.

~ Akiroq Brost

Nothing worthwhile ever came from divided attention.

~ Chris Matakas

Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.

~ Ann Voskamp

Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.

~ Winifred Gallagher

Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.

~ Colin Powell

You can't get attention of one who focused on himself.

~ Toba Beta

It's as if when I open myself up to every perception, things create their own focus.

~ Kristin Cashore

When you fully focus your mind,you make others attracted to you.

~ Toba Beta

Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.

~ Walter Isaacson

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.

~ David Foster Wallace

Sometimes we focus so much on what we don't have that we fail to see, appreciate, and use what we do have!

~ Jeff Dixon

What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

~ Walter Isaacson

...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.

~ Brian Tracy

He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his butterfly mind.

~ Eric Metaxas

If you really want to focus on something, says Castellanos, the optimum amount of time to spend on it is ninety minutes. Then change tasks. And watch out for interruptions once you're really concentrating, because it will take you twenty minutes to recover.

~ Winifred Gallagher

Such a simplified lifestyle can be truly wonderful - you'll finally have time for the things you really love, for relaxation, for outdoor activities, for exercise, for reading or finding peace and quiet, for the loved ones in your life, for the things you're most passionate about. This is what it means to thrive - to live a life full of the things you want in them, and not more. To live a better quality of life without having to spend and buy and consume.

~ Leo Babauta

Because you actually might not know what activities truly engage your attention and satisfy you, he says, it can be helpful to keep a diary of what you do all day and how you feel while doing it. Then, try to do more of what's rewarding, even if it takes an effort, and less of what isn't. Where optimal experience is concerned, he says, 'I just don't have the time' often means 'I just don't have the self-discipline.

~ Winifred Gallagher

Find your focus by seeking all that is good in your life.

~ Lorii Myers

[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, What are my big scenes? and then get every drop of juice out of

~ P.g. Wodehouse

Jobs's intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him- the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store-he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something - a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug- he would resolutely ignore it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options. He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

~ Walter Isaacson

...on the job there was nothing but the job. You left the shit outside the door. You could always pick it up on your way back out.

~ Laurell K. Hamilton

One of Job's great strengths was knowing how to focus. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do, he said. That's true for companies, and it's true for products.

~ Walter Isaacson

Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are reactant personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace.

~ Winifred Gallagher

Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim's stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy.

~ Winifred Gallagher

I am roots in the earth. I am water that flows. I am grounded. I am Watcher.

~ Veronica Wolff

When you try to persistently abolish hatred,at that very moment...you lose focus on love.

~ Toba Beta

The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.

~ Warren Buffett

What you focus on expands. So focus on what you want, not what you do not want.

~ Esther Jno-Charles

Yet he argued that even a tedious topic can take on a certain fascination if you make an effort to look at it afresh: The subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.

~ Winifred Gallagher

It took greater energy to be able to focus when heardthe voice of wisdom in a hustle bustle than in serenity.

~ Toba Beta

Research shows that when they confront a potentially unpleasant situation, such as some unfriendly faces at a gathering, these extraverts are apt to shift their attention rapidly around the room and zero in on amiable or neutral visages, thus short-circuiting the distressing images before they can get stored in memory.

~ Winifred Gallagher

this observation leads Rozin to a stunning conclusion: Disgust is the basic emotion of civilization.

~ Winifred Gallagher

Attention is a resource as abundant as sunlight. It streams outward all day long whether we choose to tap into it or not. By developing conscious focus of our attention, we learn to harness one of the greatest creative powers available to humankind, one that happens to be freely available within ourselves at all times.

~ Scott Edmund Miller

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

~ Henry James

In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience--the familiar leavened by the novel--Hobbs's art of choosing difficulties requires selecting projects that are just manageable. If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. If it's too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its zeal for the kind of work that requires you to give it all you've got: high achievers particularly relish taking on risky projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success.

~ Winifred Gallagher

What you focus on grows!

~ Kelli Wilson

However, by Sunday noon--not coincidentally, the unhappiest hour in America--you may have run through your options and wind up slumped on a couch, suffering from the Sabbath existential crisis. It's at just such unfocused, unproductive times, says Csikszentmihalyi, that people start ruminating and feeling that their lives are wasted and so forth.

~ Winifred Gallagher