Focus

Edwin Land, the scientist and inventor best known for co-founding the Polaroid Corporation and inventing instant photography, said, “My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.”

“The Hedgehog and the Fox” by Isaiah Berlin divides the world into two types of people: hedgehogs, who are absorbed by one big idea, and foxes, who dance between many.

More companies die of indigestion than starvation.

-Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard

What monks know about focus.

“A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. And ‘all machines,’ as Thoreau once said, ‘have their friction.’ The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to working thro