Focused Learning Quotes

A large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner; it is much better to be confined to a few authors than to wander at random over many.

The less unnecessary effort you put into learning, the more successful you'll be . . . Doing the wrong thing with more intensity rarely improves the situation.

A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something.

Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise, advanced degrees, or the learning of establishment schools. The fashionably educated and cultivated spurn the kind of fanatically focused learning commanded by the innovators. Wealth all too often comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring or unendurably hard.

Study as if you have not reached your goal - hold it as if you were afraid of losing what you have.

I think when you train in just one sport separately, you learn more.

I'm very simple. I have to be. I'm not very smart. I start broad, then go deep where I'm interested.

If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else.

To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.

But in physics I soon learned to scent out the paths that led to the depths, and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind, and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examination, whether one liked it or not.

Successful people, in all callings, never stop acquiring specialized knowledge related to their major purpose, business, or profession.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

It is better to have a few forms well known than to teach a little about many hundred species. Better a dozen specimens thoroughly studied as the result of the first year's work, than to have two thousand dollars' worth of shells and corals bought from a curiosity-shop. The dozen animals would be your own.

I feel if I wanted to be taken seriously I have to study music the same way someone who wants to be a doctor would study medicine. You have to know your craft and by doing so I had to make sure to ignore what people were thinking as well.

If you want learning, you must work for it.

When we accept any discipline for ourselves, we try to avoid everything except that which is necessary for our purpose; it is this purposefulness, which belongs to the adult mind, that we force upon school children. We say, "Never keep your mind aler.

More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.

Read first the best books. The important thing for you is not how much you know, but the quality of what you know.

Knowledge is the harvest of attention

The power of concentration is the only key to the treasure-house of knowledge.

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.