Selective Focus Quotes

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 what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

I love having ten times as much stuff to do as I can possibly find time to do. That way, I can pick the one-tenth that I want to do most. But if I only have enough to just occupy all my time, I'm stuck doing all of whatever stuff it happens to be.

It's easy to decide what you're going to do. The hard thing is deciding what you're not going to do.

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.

I don’t pay attention to the world. I just have the art I like and the music I like and for me that’s the whole world

The only way to get what you really want is to let go of what you don't want.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

Leaders are not pale reflectors of major social conflicts; they play up some, play down others, ignore still others.

living life was like putting the beach into a jar. The point wasn’t to fit everything in; it was to attend to the most important things first—the big, beautiful rocks—the most valuable people and experiences—and fit the lesser things in around them. Otherwise, the best things might get left out

We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.

This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark. And it's something that we do - we bring out elements that we want to emphasise.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

I'm not really into researching my opponents or other fighters other than the ones that I like.

A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.

Keep in mind that you are always saying "no" to something. If it isn't to the apparent and urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things.

Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.

In a bird's eye view you tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worms eye view you don't have that advantage of looking at everything.

With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.

The key is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want.