Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

My entire life has been spent thinking about this game. That's pretty narrow... I don't view myself as a person who's well-versed in very many subjects. I'm not proud of that.

It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they're very narrow.

Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic - to be focused on one or two things - which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.

I think that a lot of people in all walks of life have the impression, of course, that, 'I specialize in something. I can't - I don't have the time to read other things. I'll just go to pure entertainment when I'm relaxing, and then I'll come back to my pure specialty.' That produces - that attitude produces idiot savants, unfortunately.

The man who consumes sports to the exclusion of all other things will never be well-rounded.

A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study.

A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn't.

A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.

One of the things that is wrong with America is that everybody who has done anything at all in his own field is expected to be an authority on every subject under the sun.

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.

Usually I'm pretty myopic. It's hard for me to multi-task, so to speak. If I'm in a show and I'm creating a character, I'm just completely into that. It's really hard for me to do anything else like write music. I have to sort of shut down different sides of my head and just focus.

I think the whole definition of a geek is somebody being passionate and focused, and being proud of saying that they're passionate and focused, on a narrow range of subjects.

Give me a man who says this one thing I do, and not those fifty things I dabble in.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

I think any time you have too much education in one certain field, that can sometimes play against you.

Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones

In the musician, there is a tendency to have a narrowness. It's all compartmentalized. I am playing the violin; that's all I know, nothing else, no education, no nothing. You just practice every day.

I probably don't have any room in my mind for anything but football. My dad tells me I'm a total vegetable outside of just knowing football.

Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it's not just stamina in your effort. It's also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you're not really going to get anywhere. You'll never become an expert.