“Focus on what you can do best.”
“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.”
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”
“Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn t suck.”
“There is much that I do not know and I d like to know even less.”
“I didnt pay atteniton to times or distance, instead focusing on how it felt just to be in motion, knowing it wasn t about the finish line but how I got there that mattered.”
“The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.”
“Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.”
“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don t do too many things wrong.”
“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.”
“Inspiration is the windfall from hard work and focus. Muses are too unreliable to keep on the payroll.”
“In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.”
“Let us not focus on the chink in the canvas of the darkness but look at the light piercing through it. ( The final decision )”
“It is when things are at their worst that Allah will raise the best generation. The generation that the Prophet would be told Sahabat should look up to. So maybe the fact that you are living in the darkest of time means that Allah thinks you can be the strongest source of light. Allah thinks you -- you -- were born for this time. That s Allah s decision. Which means you have something significant to offer the world. You have some serious trees to plant. And you have to not get overwhelmed with the news around you. Even if dajjal is tapping you on the shoulders. Say (to Dajjal), Hold on, I m planting a tree . You do what you gotta do. You gotta focus.”
“When you fully focus your mind, you make others attracted to you.”
“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.”
“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. [BusinessWeek, May 25 1998]”