Focus quotes

From Motley Bytes Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Autotelic

“The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding... When the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Autotelic Experience”, page 67. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Flow Experience

“It is not easy to transform ordinary experience into flow, but almost everyone can improve his or her ability to do so...[but] attentional disorders not only interfere with learning, but effectively rule out the possibility of experiencing flow as well... People who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant... The association between the ability to concentrate and flow is clear.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Autotelic Personality”, page 83. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Mind Chaos

“Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training, and without an object in the external world that demands attention, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Flow of Thought”, page 119. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Tom_DeMarco and Tim_Lister

The Light Is Better There

“The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do. Getting the new disk drive installed is positively trivial compared to figuring out why Horace is in a blue funk or why Susan is dissatisfied with the company after only a few months. Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work. If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, ‘The light is better there.’”
  • Source: Book: Entitled: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Edition: 3rd. Written by: Tom DeMarco; Tim Lister. Date published: 1987; 1999; 2013. Publisher: Addison-Wesley. Country: USA; GBR; CAN; DEU; FRA; ESP; ZAF; AUS; JPN; SGP; MEX. Language: en. ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-0-321-93411-6 (alk paper); 0-321-93411-3 (alk paper). Chapter: 1 (Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing).

Glenn_Frank

Journalism and Facts

"Journalism must find the facts, it must not prejudge things in terms of conservatism or liberalism or radicalism; it must not decide in advance that it is to be conformist or non-conformist; it cannot fly in the face of facts without courting ultimate disaster. Journalism must focus the facts; facts are not important for their own sake; they are important only as a basis for action; journalism must focus the facts it finds upon the issues its readers face. Journalism must filter the facts; it must with conscientious care separate the facts from admixtures of prejudice, passion, partisanship, and selfish interest; facts that are diluted, colored, or perverted are valueless as a basis for action. Journalism must face the facts; it must learn that the energy spent in trying to find ways to get around, under, or over the facts is wasted energy; facts have a ruthless way of winning the day sooner or later. Journalism must follow the facts; journalism must say of facts as Job said, of God: though they slay us, yet shall we trust them; if the facts threaten to upset a paper's cherished policy, it always pays the journalist to reexamine his policy; that way lies realism, and realism is the ultimate good."
  • Source: Glenn Frank, spoken during an address as president of the Wisconsin local chapter of Theta Sigma Phi, at its first annual Matrix Table (9 Jan 1926). quoted in 'Journalism News and Notes', in Robert S. Crawford (ed.), The Wisconsin Alumni Magazine (Feb 1926), 27, No. 4, 101.

Steve_Jobs

Show_Them

“We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base. We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why a lot of people at Apple get paid a lot of money, because they're supposed to be on top of these things.”

Rittel_and_Webber

Tame Versus Wicked Problems

“The problems that scientists and engineers have usually focused upon are mostly 'tame' or 'benign' ones. As an example, consider a problem of mathematics, such as solving an equation, or the task of an organic chemist in analyzing the structure of some unknown compound, or that of the chess player attempting to accomplish checkmate in five moves. For each the mission is clear. It is clear, in turn, whether or not the problems have been solved. Wicked problems, in contrast, have neither of these clarifying traits.”

Eugene_Wigner

No Definite Evidence

“[F. Werner, while a student in Princeton,] came to me and expressed his bewilderment with the fact that we make a rather narrow selection when choosing the data on which we test our theories. ‘How do we know that, if we made a theory which focuses its attention on phenomena we disregard and disregards some of the phenomena now commanding our attention, that we could not build another theory which has little in common with the present one but which, nevertheless, explains just as many phenomena as the present theory?' It has to be admitted that we have no definite evidence that there is no such theory.”
  • Source: Eugene Paul Wigner, In 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,' Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics (Feb 1960), 13, No. 1 (February 1960). Collected in Eugene Paul Wigner, A.S. Wightman (ed.), Jagdish Mehra (ed.), The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner (1955), Vol. 6, 535.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Time Study Expert

“The time-study expert became the new focus of workers' antagonisms. Informal production quotas persisted and, in many cases, took on an overtly anti-management spirit. The union contract became the most important means for institutionalizing workers' instincts for self-preservation, as rationalization routed out the ordinary graces with which the workday had been laced. Concern over wages and hours, work rules, and working conditions began to replace the craftworker's culturally embedded practices of effort regulation. Overall, the purification of effort meant a heightened standard of labor discipline, and as such it widened the gulf between those who gave of their bodies in the service of production and those who did not.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 46. ISBN:0465032125.