I don't think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.

While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.

The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.

For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often that not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities...The low achievers found pleasure and flow in socializing, not in studying.