Will Oldham Quotes

I think the frustration you can get into as a young artist is when you realize your limitations, but you want to accomplish that rather than seeing that you don't have to do everything. Just focus on your strengths.

Always staying focused is something that's been very tough for me. I'm still working on it.

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing. This focus and intensity helps to eliminate wasted effort and distractions. Most companies die from indigestion rather than starvation, i.e., companies suffer from doing too many things at the same time rather than doing too few things very well.

When you take away the phone and e-mail and you don't have a million things to run around to, it allows your mind the space to think more expansively about the things that matter.

I believe in doing what I am best at.

I have ideas in mind, things that I'm working toward. There have to be goals; there has to be a challenge. Just playing, in and of itself, is great. But there has to be some motivation to it.

You have a small period of time when you can perfect your career and become good at it. A lot of guys get distracted, which only hurts them. You must stay focused and work very hard at boxing.

I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.

I need to have something else going on. I'm able to write a lot if I have an episode of 'Friday Night Lights' going on my computer.

My secret is simple. I have a very short attention span, and writing lots of things fast appeases that very attention span.

I had tried to get focused on other things. But I always ended up back in the same place, and it wasn't making me happy. I needed to get the focus back.

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

I need to start honing in on projects that I want to devote my time to and not put my energies into the unattainable ones.

I have a great interest in a number of things, perhaps too many. I admire people who seem to concentrate on only one fixed discipline to the exclusion of almost everything else.

I always tell myself, 'When I'm working on my record, I won't cut my hair.' I get so focused on the music that I'm not really going to the hair shop and getting cut up. I just have one thing to focus on.

When I model I pretty much go blank. You can't think too much or it doesn't work.

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

It is those who concentrates on but one thing at a time who advance in this world. The great man or woman is the one who never steps outside his or her specialty or foolishly dissipates his or her individuality.

Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses.

I was one of those lucky people with only one talent. It is harder for people with many talents to decide what to do.

You can only bite off so much, so you gotta know what you want to do.

I think you can spread yourself way too thin way too easily, so when I'm trying to create, I'm trying to create ideas for projects and have a vision for other people.

Acting and recording an album at the same time, that's not my sport. I could write a movie when my attention was paid to that. But I'm good at one thing at a time.

One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.

Here in Seattle, I'm the most productive I've ever been. I don't allow myself personal distractions. I'm extremely disciplined here.