In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.

There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world

If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.

Attention is psychic energy, and like physical energy, unless we allocate some part of it to the task at hand, no work gets done.

Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.

Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions make any difference.

Enjoyment, on the other hand, is not always pleasant, and it can be very stressful at times. A mountain climber, for example, may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, and in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Sipping a piña colada under a palm tree at the edge of the turquoise ocean is idyllic, but it just doesn't compare to the exhilaration he feels on the windswept ridge.