#attention

Oh yeah, I mean every fighter has got be dedicated, learn how to sacrifice, know what the devotion is all about, make sure you're paying attention and studying your art. ↗

— Marvin Hagler

#art #attention #dedicated #devotion #every

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.” “Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events. “So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#conversation #delilah-mcphee #humor #jules #paying-attention

Not every President is a great speaker. Not every President is a great thinker. But in the modern era, every single President is a master of one thing: eye contact. ↗

— Brad Meltzer

#leadership #presidency #leadership

But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive? ↗

— William Booth

#attention #concentrated #desperate #gospel #keep

Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are "reactant" personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#control #focus #reactant #experience

Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is "to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#focus #work #experience

Once out of your cradle, you don't focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#consciousness #focus #rationalism #experience

Well the press and things like that are pretty hard core, but I don't pay too much attention to that. ↗

— Holly Valance

#core #hard #i #like #much

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. ↗

— Simone Veil

#beautiful #fixing #his #poet #produces

Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers—seems thereby to produce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#drawing #interest #interesting #imagination