Singular Focus Quotes

When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of ‘interest’ and ‘attention’, so long as we focus on the ‘singular moments’ and the ‘appealing details’ in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ("Lost the global story.")

Utopianism's equality is intolerant of diversity, uniqueness, debate, etc., for utopianism's purpose requires a singular focus. There can be no competing voices or causes slowing or obstructing society's long and righteous march. Utopianism relies on deceit, propaganda, dependence, intimidation, and force. In its more aggressive state, as the malignancy of the enterprise becomes more painful and its impossibility more obvious, it incites violence inasmuch as avenues for free expression and civil dissent are cut off. Violence becomes the individual's primary recourse and the state's primary response. Ultimately, the only way out is the state's termination.

To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they're communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they're actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person's body language. That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that's like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we're having a conversation. Singular. We're paying attention to what is being said, considering that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been booing on for the last several thousand years? I didn't even know that they existed until I read that stupid article, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. ... So, ladies, if you ever have some conversation with your boyfriend or husband or brother or male friend, and you are telling him something perfectly obvious, and he comes away from it utterly clueless? I know it's tempting to thing to yourself, 'The man can't possibly be that stupid!' But yes. Yes, he can. Our innate strengths just aren't the same. We are the mighty hunters, who are good at focusing on one thing at a time. For crying out loud, we have to turn down the radio in the car if we suspect we're lost and need to figure out how to get where we're going. That's how impaired we are. I'm telling you, we have only the one conversation. Maybe some kind of relationship veteran like Michael Carpenter can do two, but that's pushing the envelope. Five simultaneous conversations? Five? Shah. That just isn't going to happen. At least, not for me.

He lifted his head and opened his eyes. Singularly focused, dark, and of one mind-set. Simon was about to fuck.

My come smeared her thighs, but I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. My mind was singularly focused on fucking. I was going to fill her with my come. I wanted to feel it gush around my cock, seep out of her, and pool on the floor.

The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more effective. [4]

When a painting I’m working on becomes my singular focus—when I am “in the zone,” as I’ve heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me.

It was simply part of the uniform, and she’d do anything to maximize profits. This singular focus and pragmatism is what made her so successful.

Our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

It may be the character of his mind, to be always in singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery.

Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled.

In profound meditation, they found, when consciousness is so acutely focused that it is utterly withdrawn from the body and mind, it enters a kind of singularity in which the sense of a separate ego disappears. In this state, the supreme climax of meditation, the seers discovered a core of consciousness beyond time and change. They called it simply Atman, the Self.

The technical term that is often used for this is “interpersonally exploitative.” In short, because of the singular focus on fulfilling their needs, especially external needs, narcissists will use other people as objects to get those needs met. Other people often do serve literally as objects—a tool to get a job done. Because you are not in on this secret in the beginning, it can feel a bit depersonalizing—as though you are only valued when you are functional. It can feel manipulative, because your partner may compliment you excessively and then hit you with a difficult request or ask you to make uncomfortable requests.

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

He was no longer a wildfire burning with rage. He was now the fires of the forges he'd stoked. He burned for a purpose and remained focused on that singular goal.

To maximize productivity, schedule 3–5 hour blocks or half-days of singularly focused attention on ONE single activity or project, rather than trying to switch tasks every 60 minutes.

If you truly want to become uncommon amongst the uncommon, it will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time. It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort. This may sound appealing but will require everything you have to give and then some. Believe me, this is not for everyone because it will demand singular focus and may upset the balance in your life.

Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind's extreme dissociation is that each ego state is totally without knowledge of the other. Because of this, the researchers for the CIA and the Department of Defense believed they could take a personality, train him or her to be a killer and no other ego stares would be aware of the violence that was taking place. The personality running the body would be genuinely unaware of the deaths another personality was causing. Even torture could not expose the with, because the personality experiencing the torture would have no awareness of the information being sought. Earlier, such knowledge was gained from therapists working with adults who had multiple personalities. The earliest pioneers in the field, such as Dr. Ralph Alison, a psychiatrist then living in Santa Cruz, California, were helping victims of severe early childhood trauma. Because there were no protocols for treatment, the pioneers made careful notes, publishing their discoveries so other therapists would understand how to help these rare cases. By 1965, the information was fairly extensive, including the knowledge that only unusually intelligent children become multiple personalities and that sexual trauma endured by a restrained child under the age of seven is the most common way to induce hysteric dissociation.

The armor separated him from the galaxy, from everyone, made him singular, freed him from the needs of the flesh, the concerns of the body that once had plagued him, and allowed him to focus solely on his relationship to the Force.

Too many people, too many times, have come between us. Not again.” This man, this beautiful, unattainable man is mine. And he loves me like a Mack truck—the huge ones that just keep coming and don’t stop for anything in their path. Being the object of such singular focus can be overwhelming, but it’s also the best feeling in the world. “Are you saying you want this for good?” I ask, more confident than I’ve ever been. “For good?” He frowns and gives a quick shake of his head. “For good is too sanitized. I want your dirt and your pain and your darkness. Your weakness and your flaws.” He sprinkles kisses over my cheeks and nose, leaving adoration everywhere he touches me. “I don’t want you for good, Banner,” he says. “I want you forever.” I gasp at hearing the future in his words, of the picture he’s painting. “I love you,” he tells me again. “I didn’t even think I was capable of saying that, much less feeling it, but I feel it for you.

While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told. “I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.

He didn't say another word, not for a long time, just looked at her with that singular focus, his jaw tight, his skin warm against hers, his breath fanning over her face. His lips hovered just an inch from hers, that musky scent of his surrounding them in a deadly cocoon.

The questions are many: How long can he last? How much food does he have? Can Ares 4 rescue him? How will we talk to him? The answers to these questions are not what we want to hear. “I can’t promise we’ll succeed in rescuing him, but I can promise this: The entire focus of NASA will be to bring Mark Watney home. This will be our overriding and singular obsession until he is either back on Earth or confirmed dead on Mars.

Jackson described her technique of zeroing in on a few specific words that take on a special significance in the context of each novel. Merricat’s symbolic words, “safe” and “clean,” pinpoint her singular focus: keeping the private world of the Blackwood estate free from intruders and perfectly in order (according to her own irrational logic).

The entire focus of NASA will be to bring Mark Watney home. This will be our overriding and singular obsession until he is either back on Earth or confirmed dead on Mars.

the whisperings from the heart are always authentic and singular in their focus. The heart knows what it wants. The

what is the one thought that can successfully interrupt every negative thought pattern? It’s this: I have a choice. That’s it. The singular, interrupting thought is this one: I have a choice. If you have trusted in Jesus as your Savior, you have the power of God in you to choose! You are no longer a slave to passions, to lusts, to strongholds, to sin of any kind. You have a God-given, God-empowered, God-redeemed ability to choose what you think about. You have a choice regarding where you focus your energy. You have a choice regarding what you live for.

The consumer expects a reward for the slightest effort—or better, for no effort at all. He cares only about what he gets from the world, not about what he might add to it. Living on the surface, jumping from thing to thing, his energy is diffused, like milk spreading across a tabletop. He makes no impact on the world; when his time on earth is over, it’s as if he never lived. The creator won’t accept that fate. Everything he does is with the intention of making an impact on the world. His code ensures this: He doesn’t accept the world as he finds it; he brings things into the world that aren’t already there. He doesn’t follow the herd; he sets his own course. He ignores the reactions of others. He resists superficial distractions. He remains focused on his goals even if he has to sacrifice his immediate gratification. Anyone can live by this code, but very few of us do. It means putting your life in the service of higher forces. These forces can’t be found on the surface of life; they’re found in its depths. The creator’s energy must have the singular focus of a drill boring through stone. As difficult as that is, a creator is rewarded many times over for his efforts. You don’t have to be an artist to be a creator. You can add something to the world in any human activity—even the most routine. Your job, your role as a parent, your relationships, your contribution to your community—all become more meaningful when you put your personal stamp on them using higher forces. For

We focus our attention on impending catastrophes, while the true catastrophes are already here, under our noses, with the degeneration of social practices, with the mass media's numbing effect, with a collective will blinded by the ideology of the 'market', in other words, succumbing to the law of the masses, to entropy, to the loss of singularity, to a general and collective infantilization. The old types of social relations, the old relations with sex, with time, with the cosmos, with human finitude have been rattled, not to say devastated, by the 'progress' generated by industrial firms.

I can’t leave crowds for mountaintop, daily blur for Walden Pond—but there’s always the possibility of the singular vision. I remember: Contemplative simplicity isn’t a matter of circumstances; it’s a matter of focus.

Focus is passé. In the modern world we want to feel everything all the time. There is no point in just taking a walk in the park when we can also listen to headphones, munch on a hot dog, crank up our vibrating soles to the maximum, and check out the passing carnival of humanity. Our choices about the creed of a new world order: stimulation! Thought and creativity have become subservient to the singular goal of saturating our senses.

According to business and economics professor Paul Harvey, “a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations.”1 If you believe that you’re special, and all you have to do is find your singular passion and turn it into a perfect job, that’s a recipe for disaster. The reality is that the world owes you nothing. You only become “special” by developing skills that are in demand, which takes focus, grit, and long-term work.

I can’t promise we’ll succeed in rescuing him, but I can promise this: The entire focus of NASA will be to bring Mark Watney home. This will be our overriding and singular obsession until he is either back on Earth or confirmed dead on Mars

As a side benefit, this cognitive shift to a different-from-usual mode of thinking results in a marvelous state of being, a highly focused, singularly attentive, deeply engaging, wordless, timeless, productive, and mentally restorative state.

These “Singularians” have gone so far as to establish their own educational institution. Singularity University, located in Silicon Valley, offers unaccredited graduate-level programs focused on the study of exponential technology and counts Google, Genentech, Cisco, and Autodesk among its corporate sponsors.

I wonder if there has been a book written on toes—the bottom parts of a body are just as important as the top parts. Each chapter would focus on one of the ten toes and each would inspire singular, existential commentary: the potential of our toes as leaders, the solidity of our little instruments, the dangers of relating size and value. It would be called The Toe Manifesto and people would be interested in reading it because, after all, it is the toe that goes forward first and foremost, and the toe that helps to tell us if our bodies are hot or cold—in other words, the toe experiences far more than we give it credit for.

The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture. Japan’s most famous shokunin these days is Jiro Ono, immortalized in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but you will encounter his level of relentless focus across the entire food industry.

We are drowning in books just as we are drowning in TV shows. And yet we can only read one book - and watch one TV show - at a time. We have multiplied everything, but we are still individual selves. There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

In the years leading up to 2019, I had been so singularly focused on trying to rebuild my relationship with the city that I had forgotten it never belonged to us in the first place. [...] Hong Kong is a city that is always dying. Mainstream media had pronounced Hong Kong dead as early as 1995, and every few months or years some political commentator who suddenly remembered we existed would pen a new obituary.

Others were now recruited and, despite their obvious impressions of the man, agreed to sign on. Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general, one of the most respected commanders in the U.S. armed forces; Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush loyalists—all of them were now focused on the singular fact that while he might be a peculiar figure, even an absurd-seeming one, he had been elected president

While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told. I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.

Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.

Yet the hunger to treat patients still drove Farber. And sitting in his basement laboratory in the summer of 1947, Farber had a single inspired idea: he chose, among all cancers, to focus his attention on one of its oddest and most hopeless variants—childhood leukemia. To understand cancer as a whole, he reasoned, you needed to start at the bottom of its complexity, in its basement. And despite its many idiosyncrasies, leukemia possessed a singularly attractive feature: it could be measured. Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. If cancer medicine was to be transformed into a rigorous science, then cancer would need to be counted somehow—measured in some reliable, reproducible way. In this, leukemia was different from nearly every other type of cancer. In a world before CT scans and MRIs, quantifying the change in size of an internal solid tumor in the lung or the breast was virtually impossible without surgery: you could not measure what you could not see. But leukemia, floating freely in the blood, could be measured as easily as blood cells—by drawing a sample of blood or bone marrow and looking at it under a microscope. If leukemia could be counted, Farber reasoned, then any intervention—a chemical sent circulating through the blood, say—could be evaluated for its potency in living patients. He could watch cells grow or die in the blood and use that to measure the success or failure of a drug. He could perform an “experiment” on cancer.

Dear Kincaid, You are the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. When you're in a room, it's like there's no one else there because you're all I can focus on. I wish I could tell you all the things I think and feel about you to your face, but I'm not sure I'm the guy you'd want to hear them from. Even so, I want you to know that there's someone in the world who realizes how special you are. Not because you're pretty, Not because you're funny. Not because you're smart. Though you are all those things. But because you are full of a light that outshines everyone else I've ever met. You, Kincaid Breslin, are singular. You are everything.

What had become of the singular ascending ambition that had driven young Roosevelt from his earliest days? What explains his willingness, against the counsel of his most trusted friends, to accept seemingly low-level jobs that traced neither a clear-cut nor a reliably ascending career path? The answer lies in probing what Roosevelt gleaned from his crucible experience. His expectation of and belief in a smooth, upward trajectory, either in life or in politics, was gone forever. He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too “careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.” Thereafter, he would jettison long-term career calculations and focus simply on whatever job opportunity came his way, assuming it might be his last. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” he liked to say. In a very real way, Roosevelt had come to see political life as a succession of crucibles—good or bad—able to crush or elevate. He would view each position as a test of character, effort, endurance, and will. He would keep nothing in reserve for some will-o-the-wisp future. Rather, he would regard each job as a pivotal test, a manifestation of his leadership skills.

These include: the Bar Raiser hiring process that ensures that the company continues to acquire top talent; a bias for separable teams run by leaders with a singular focus that optimizes for speed of delivery and innovation; the use of written narratives instead of slide decks to ensure that deep understanding of complex issues drives well-informed decisions; a relentless focus on input metrics to ensure that teams work on activities that propel the business. And finally there is the product development process that gives this book its name: working backwards from the desired customer experience. Many of the business problems that Amazon faces are no different from those faced by every other company, small or large. The difference is how Amazon keeps coming up with uniquely Amazonian solutions to those problems. Taken together, these elements combine to form a way of thinking, managing, and working that we refer to as being Amazonian, a term that we coined for the purposes of this book. Both of us, Colin and Bill, were “in the room,” and—along with other senior leaders—we shaped and refined what it means to be Amazonian. We both worked extensively with Jeff and were actively involved in creating a number of Amazon’s most enduring successes (not to mention some of its notable flops) in what was the most invigorating professional experience of our lives.

I’m trying to remember how I got this way. I don’t recall always being this out of it. Nicholas Carr blames our use of electronic technology for scraping us gaunt. In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Carr points out that our habitual electronic multitasking between smartphones, websites, news feeds, and social media is dramatically rewiring the neurological pathways in our brains. According to Carr, all our browsing and liking and streaming and retweeting has conditioned the ability to focus right out of us. “In the choices we have made . . . ,” writes Carr, “we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration. . . . We have cast our lot with the juggler.”4 “Tell me,” a wise friend once asked, “What is it you are doing with the singular gift of your life?” Juggling?

The popular 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates how AI’s personalization will cause you to be unconsciously manipulated by AI and motivated by profit from advertising. The Social Dilemma star Tristan Harris says: “You didn’t know that your click caused a supercomputer to be pointed at your brain. Your click activated billions of dollars of computing power that has learned much from its experience of tricking two billion human animals to click again.” And this addiction results in a vicious cycle for you, but a virtuous cycle for the big Internet companies that use this mechanism as a money-printing machine. The Social Dilemma further argues that this may narrow your viewpoints, polarize society, distort truth, and negatively affect your happiness, mood, and mental health. To put it in technical terms, the core of the issue is the simplicity of the objective function, and the danger from single-mindedly optimizing a single objective function, which can lead to harmful externalities. Today’s AI usually optimizes this singular goal—most commonly to make money (more clicks, ads, revenues). And AI has a maniacal focus on that one corporate goal, without regard for users’ well-being.

Victorious in World War I, the ruling powers of France and the United Kingdom spent the 1920s rebuilding their economies and military strength, while Germany remained subordinate, its power stunted by the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty demanded severe economic reparations and imposed tight constraints on the German military, prohibiting it from having planes, tanks, and any more than 100,000 troops. Germany was forced to surrender its overseas colonies as well as 13 percent of its European territory (and 10 percent of its population), and to submit to Allied occupation of its industrial core, the Rhineland.125 Most damaging to German pride was the “war guilt” clause, which laid blame for the war squarely on Germany. While “bitterly resented by almost all Germans,”126 the so-called “slave treaty”127 nevertheless “left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation.”128 Only twenty years after the Great War, Adolf Hitler would use that strength in a second attempt to overturn the European order. Hitler “focused relentlessly” on bringing about Germany’s rise.129 After his National Socialist Party won elections in 1933, Hitler moved to consolidate his power through extra-democratic means. He justified himself with a call to marshal “all German national energies” toward the singular objective of rearmament to secure his vision of Lebensraum for the German people: “He wanted the whole of central Europe and all of Russia, up to the Volga for German Lebensraum to secure Germany’s self-sufficiency and status as a great power,” as Paul Kennedy puts it.130

Jackaby was still engrossed in his examination when I came back inside. “Books. Books. Just books,” he was muttering. Jenny was hovering by the window. I joined her. “How did you manage it, by the way?” I asked. “All those Bibles, all across town? It is a remarkable feat.” “It looks more impressive than it is,” she said, still not meeting my eyes. “I borrowed Jackaby’s special satchel, the one that holds anything. The whole pile took just one trip. The real trick was keeping myself solid all the way home. That’s the bit I’m really proud of—” She turned to face me. “Oh, Abigail, it was amazing. People saw me!” “People saw you?” “I was in disguise, of course. I wore my long coat and gloves, and I had that floppy white hat on, so they didn’t see much, but still—people saw me and they didn’t gasp or make a scene. Someone even mumbled Good day to me as I was crossing the footbridge! It was exhilarating! I have never been so excited to have somebody see me—actually see me—and not care at all!” She glanced at Jackaby. “Although you would think I would be used to it by now.” “Jenny, that is absolutely amazing!” I said. “It is, isn’t it?” she said wistfully. “Just a little bit, at least? Oh, Abigail, I’m exhausted, I’m not ashamed to tell you. I had planned on setting my spoils out in nice triumphant rows when I got back, but it was all I could do to hold myself intact by then. Solidity is sort of like flexing a muscle, except the muscle is in your mind, and your mind is really just an abstract concept. I was basically flexing my entire body into existence the whole way home. But did it merit so much as a Good job, Jenny from that infuriating man?” Jackaby surfaced from his perusal and looked up at last. His cloud gray eyes found focus on Jenny. From his expression, I couldn’t tell if he had been following our conversation or not. “Completely unexceptional,” he said. “Nothing at all in this batch. We will need to scrutinize them more closely, of course, just to be sure. Oh, and Miss Cavanaugh . . .” She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “You performed . . . quite adequately,” he said, “despite expectations.” Jenny opened her mouth to reply, but then closed it again. Her face fluttered through a series of potential reactions. Finally she just threw up her hands and vanished from sight with a muffled whuph of air closing into the space where she suddenly wasn’t. “What in heaven’s name was all that?” said Jackaby. “Exquisite frustration, I believe, sir.” “Ah. Right.” He slumped into the desk chair and began to fidget absently with the spine of one of the Bibles. “Miss Cavanaugh is a singular and exceptional spirit, you know.” “Only a suggestion, sir, but that is precisely the sort of thing you might consider saying when she is still present and corporeal.

This one’s for the unusual motherfuckers in this world. A lot of people think that once they reach a certain level of status, respect, or success, that they’ve made it in life. I’m here to tell you that you always have to find more. Greatness is not something that if you meet it once it stays with you forever. That shit evaporates like a flash of oil in a hot pan. If you truly want to become uncommon amongst the uncommon, it will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time. It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort. This may sound appealing but will require everything you have to give and then some. Believe me, this is not for everyone because it will demand singular focus and may upset the balance in your life.

The foundation of Islam is tawheed (Oneness), but tawheed is not just about saying that God is One. It is so much deeper. It is about the Oneness of purpose, of fear, of worship, of ultimate love for God. It is the oneness of vision and focus. It is to direct one’s sight on one singular point, allowing everything else to fall into place.

Essay: Scientific Advances are Ruining Science Fiction I write science fiction thrillers for a living, set five to ten years in the future, an exercise that allows me to indulge my love of science, futurism, and philosophy, and to examine in fine granularity the impact of approaching revolutions in technology. But here is the problem: I’d love to write pure science fiction, set hundreds of years in the future. Why don’t I? I guess the short answer is that to do so, I’d have to turn a blind eye to everything I believe will be true hundreds of years from now. Because the truth is that books about the future of humanity, such as Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, have ruined me. As a kid, I read nothing but science fiction. This was a genre that existed to examine individuals and societies through the lens of technological and scientific change. The best of this genre always focused on human beings as much as technology, something John W. Campbell insisted upon when he ushered in what is widely known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. But for the most part, writers in past generations could feel confident that men and women would always be men and women, at least for many thousands of years to come. We might develop technology that would give us incredible abilities. Go back and forth through time, travel to other dimensions, or travel through the galaxy in great starships. But no matter what, in the end, we would still be Grade A, premium cut, humans. Loving, lusting, and laughing. Scheming and coveting. Crying, shouting, and hating. We would remain ambitious, ruthless, and greedy, but also selfless and heroic. Our intellects and motivations in this far future would not be all that different from what they are now, and if we lost a phaser battle with a Klingon, the Grim Reaper would still be waiting for us.

This other, when it makes its appearance, is immediately in possession of everything that it will never be given to us to know. This other is the locus of our secret, of everything in us that no longer belongs to the realm of the true. This other is thus not, as in love, the locus of our alikeness, nor, as in alienation, the locus of our difference; neither the ideal image of what we are nor the obscure model of what we lack. Rather, this other is the locus of what escapes us, and the way whereby we escape from ourselves. The other here is not the locus of desire, not the locus of alienation, but the locus of vertiginousness, of eclipse, of appearing and disappearing - the locus, one might say (but we must not), of the scintillation of being. For the rule of seduction is, precisely, secrecy, and the secret in question is that of the fundamental rule. Seduction knows that the other is never the end of desire, that the subject is mistaken when he focuses on what he loves, just as an utterance is mistaken when it focuses on what it says. Secrecy here is always the secrecy of artifice. The necessity of always focusing somewhere else, of never seeking the other in the terrifying illusion of dialogue but instead following the other like the other's own shadow, and circumscribing him. Never being oneself - but never being alienated either: coming from without to inscribe oneself upon the figure of the Other, within that strange form from elsewhere, that secret form which orders not only chains of events but also existences in their singularity. The Other is what allows me not to repeat myself for ever.

Filling the well involves the active pursuit of images to refresh our artistic reservoirs. Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. Art may seem to spring from pain, but perhaps that is because pain serves to focus our attention onto details (for instance, the excruciatingly beautiful curve of a lost lover’s neck). Art may seem to involve broad strokes, grand schemes, great plans. But it is the attention to detail that stays with us; the singular image is what haunts us and becomes art. Even in the midst of pain, this singular image brings delight. The artist who tells you different is lying. In order to function in the language of art, we must learn to live in it comfortably. The language of art is image, symbol. It is a wordless language even when our very art is to chase it with words. The artist’s language is a sensual one, a language of felt experience. When we work at our art, we dip into the well of our experience and scoop out images. Because we do this, we need to learn how to put images back. How do we fill the well? ...In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do - spiritual sit ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery. A mystery draws us in, leads us on, lures us. 

If we are to have any hope of achieving this type of transformation we need to accept that our current attitude is not a singularly accurate product of our life thus far. It is easy to overlook this fact and to believe that a poor attitude on our part is justified by what we have had to endure. A difficult upbringing, mistreatment by others, or plain bad luck can easily convince us that our attitude, while perhaps not ideal, is based on the reality of our situation. This belief, however, overlooks two important considerations. Firstly, humans are susceptible to all sorts of biases, prone to self-deception and capable of the greatest delusions. But even if we were to grant that much of what sculpted our attitude is based in fact, and not on our distorted view of these facts, this brings up the following set of questions: ‘Which facts?’, ‘Why those facts?’ and ‘Why not others?’ For as William James put it, the world is a “blooming, buzzing confusion” and for order to emerge, whether it be the order of a scientific theory, or the order that creates our sense of self and our attitude toward life, we must be selective about which facts we focus on, which ones we diminish and which ones we completely ignore.

In yogic tradition, this is called Ekāgratā—intense focus on a singular point. The ability to put your mind fully into or onto something, allowing you to understand both it … and yourself in a new way.

I had been so singularly focused on where I was going that I hadn’t stopped to think about what I would be leaving behind.

It hadn’t been enough to keep the majority of her students from failing to launch after high school, but the few she had helped to realize their potential had never forgotten her. Katie had waged war against a broken system, resigning from teaching to tackle the root of the issues directly in her early thirties. Her singular focus was tearing it up from the inside and becoming a thorn in the side of the bureaucrats. She was present at every meeting, every gala, fête, or fundraiser, campaigning

All the enemy truly cares about is you jumping out of God’s protective presence. Once you are away from the loving shelter of the Almighty, the enemy’s singular focus is your continual slide toward utter destruction. He wants everything in you that belongs to Jesus to die. Whether slow or quick makes no difference to him; our enemy is always watching and waiting for an avenue to attack and destroy. His endgame is to run you down into a spiritual massacre so complete that the horrifying result will be his defecation on your skull.

There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

The singular focus of successful parenting isn’t about being a perfect parent; it’s about becoming a parent who notices and nurtures the best in a child.

Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. Art may seem to spring from pain, but perhaps that is because pain serves to focus our attention onto details ... the singular image is what haunts us and becomes art. Even in the midst of pain, this singular image brings delight.

I myself would like to see more explicit attention paid to the losses experienced due to the Japanese occupation in the Pacific during World War II, and for this history to be as much in dialog with Western culture as the war in Europe and the Holocaust has been, both in film and art, as well as in classrooms and in literature. Not only do I think it's important for the Western survivors of the internment camps like my father to be acknowledged and their trauma addressed, but the vast majority of Japanese forces' victims in World War II were millions of Asians, and with the singular focus on the Nazi occupation, I think there's a great deal of Eurocentrism in our Western understanding of the Second World War. It's important that we address this, because an attitude in the West of regions we deem as less important can lead to events such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994, during which the Western world turned a blind eye and the United Nations refused to send aid as an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. As long as we continue to divide the world according to our "us and them" mentality, I believe these tragedies will continue. This is not just about politics, because when we talk about politics we are talking about people.

Using the first-person singular pronoun is another great way to set a boundary without escalating into confrontation. When you say, “I’m sorry, that doesn’t work for me,” the word “I” strategically focuses your counterpart’s attention onto you long enough for you to make a point.

parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19–31 gives us a glimpse of that horrifying torment, and therefore it is a singularly terrifying parable. This parable focuses on severe contrasts. The characters are a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus. The rich man is described in the most opulent terms. He dresses like royalty,

Have great goals which truly motivate and inspire yourself, and then have a singularity of focus.

Coined in 1975 by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow state is the phenomenon in which a person is fully immersed in an activity that leads to focus, energized involvement, and enjoyment. A person in flow state is no longer thinking of multiple things, or even their sense of self, but is singularly focused on a task or challenge. Many people report it is the happiest feeling in their lives.

This world is a slippery place, and the Scriptures are a rock on which to stand. This world is a dark place, and the Scriptures are the light with which we may make our way. This world is a corrupt place, and the Scriptures outline the true way of purity for us. The world is a false place, and the Scriptures tell us the truth—about God, about man, about sin, about salvation, and about revelation. The world is a seductive place, and the Scriptures speak to us in a way that reveals the vanity of it. The world is a blurry place, and the Scriptures bring everything into singular focus. The world is a distracting place, and the Scriptures bring all the right priorities together. The world is an evil place, and the Scriptures testify to us of all that is holy, righteous, and good. The world is a lost place, and the Scriptures show us how we might be used to lead the world home.

5. Community. At SoulBoom, our diverse community will embrace inclusion at every level—more on that in a little bit. Most importantly, however, our community will have a singular focus on empowering, training, and investing in children and youth. Our goal here is social revolution via spiritual transformation. Century after century, it has been youth who sparked the greatest revolutions in the world: the Arab Spring, the Velvet Revolution, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the Tiananmen Square protests. All the way up to Black Lives Matter and the young women and students leading an uprising against oppression in Iran.

For example, from 1880 to 1900, life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from about thirty-nine to forty-nine, but from 1980 to 2000—after the focus of medicine had shifted from infectious disease to chronic and degenerative disease—it only increased from seventy-four to seventy-six.

Hawking focused on the ISST, the “initial singularity of space-time.” This “initial singularity” receives its name from a breakdown in Einstein’s equations when we use them to travel conceptually back in time.

Divided attention destroys best intentions. Singular focus is the friend to success.

Eye on the shuttlecock, she ran forward, raised her battledore high, and slammed right into Henry Weston’s chest. The wind knocked from her, Emma lost her balance and might have fallen had not Mr. Weston’s arms shot out and caught her about the waist and shoulder. “Oh,” she cried, embarrassed to have plowed into the man. Embarrassed to find his arms around her. Embarrassed to find she liked it. “I’m so sorry,” she blurted, pushing away from him. “Don’t be. I admire your singular focus. My goodness, Miss Smallwood, where is the timid little creature who flinched at every flying bird as though it were a cricket ball headed for her nose?” Emma straightened and righted her off-kilter bonnet. “I was determined not to embarrass myself,” she admittedly breathlessly. “Only to do just that.” He chuckled, and their eyes met in a moment of shared levity. Then he sobered. “Thank you for the laugh, Miss Smallwood. Just what I needed after yesterday.

The moment you concentrate the focus of your mind on a singular purpose, extraordinary gifts will appear within your life.

He was unrelenting, unmerciful, and singularly focused. Nothing stood in his way or hindered his journey. Until his end itself.

As the celebrated investor Warren Buffett once said, "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." We would add one more line: "If you do your homework." In business deals, most buyers and sellers have a singular focus on price — and price is hard to avoid. Negotiations ideally produce numbers that both sides can be happy with. But getting to the right price in any deal involves understanding what business assets are truly worth and then structuring a deal around financing and tax realities, which can be quite surprising to those who fail to plan.

Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one’s singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled. Studies

Stephen Hawking recently commented in the German magazine Focus that computer intelligence will surpass that of humans within a few decades. He advocated that we “urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain, so that computers can add to human intelligence, rather than be in opposition.”25 Hawking can take comfort that the development program he is recommending is well under way.

The idea of the individual is actually an ingenious solution to a difficult social-philosophical problem: Should we focus on society as a whole, or on its different parts and singular processes?

Front sight focus is that state of intense concentration in which all your resources and abilities are brought to bear on a singular intention, when you’re so locked on to the crosshair reticle inside your scope (or, in an iron sights system, the sighting device at the front of your weapon, hence front sight focus) that everything else blurs and disappears

Then he lifted his head and opened his eyes. Singularly focused, dark, and of one mind-set. Simon was about to fuck.

Collecting anything requires a singularity of focus, but 78 collecting demands an almost-inhuman level of concentration. There is a violence to the search, a dysfunctional aggression that vacillates between repellent and endearingly quirky. It’s intimidating to outsiders, and it feeds on sacrifice.

farm-to-table focuses on those singular tomatoes and carrots without considering the entire harvest. It

farm-to-table focuses on those singular tomatoes and carrots without considering the entire harvest. It’s a way of eating that is ecologically expensive; it also tends to ignore all that’s required to produce the most delicious food.

The Firstborn Over All Creation   (Col. 1:15–20) This passage includes a powerful defense of Christ’s deity. Apparently, a central component of the heresy that threatened the Colossian church was the denial of the deity of Christ. Ironically, throughout the centuries some cults have used the phrase “firstborn over all creation” (1:15) to undermine Christ’s deity. The assumption is that if Jesus was born at creation, then He is more like us than He is like God. The Greek word for firstborn, however, can refer to one who was born first chronologically, but it most often refers to preeminence in position or rank (Heb.1:6; Rom. 8:9). Firstborn in this context clearly means highest in rank, not first created (Ps. 89:27; Rev. 1:5) for several reasons: • Christ cannot be both “first begotten” and “only begotten” (see John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9); and, when the firstborn is one of a class, the class is in the plural form (1:18; Rom. 8:29), but “creation,” the class here, is in a singular form. • If Paul were teaching that Christ was a created being, he would be agreeing with the heresy that he was writing to refute. • It is impossible for Christ to be both created and the Creator of everything (1:16). Thus, Jesus is the firstborn in the sense that He has the preeminence (1:18) and that He possesses the right of inheritance “over all creation” (Heb. 1:2; Rev. 5:1–7, 13).

For the very first time in my life, I can’t concentrate. I’ve never had a problem with it before, always able to put singular focus on any task I attempted. Even though I have an amazingly high IQ, I would never have accomplished what I have so far in life without the ability to funnel my thoughts with the precision of a drill team.

Ego is “I”; it is your singular point of view. In innocence this point of view is pure, like a clear lens. But without innocence the ego’s focus is extremely distorting.

IN some ways, the relentless electronic interconnectivity of our lives serves to highlight therapy’s singular virtues. We are more appreciative of the strange, private dialogue that is the heart of therapy. There are precious few times and spaces left in our society in which people quietly speak to one another in a sustained, intimate conversation. The therapist’s office is one of the last safe places. Secrets, reflections, fears or confusion never leave the room. And it is also a refuge. My patients often arrive early just to sit in the waiting room — an unusual interlude of quiet. Then there’s the session itself. In some ways therapy is, more than ever, the ultimate luxury: To be the focus of a thoughtful person who is listening, caring and helping to make sense of life’s chaos is something that the Internet can never provide. Anna Fels is a psychiatrist and faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Population studies indicate that something is going terribly wrong: people ages twenty-four to sixty-five are dying eight to fifteen years younger than previous generations from preventable lifestyle diseases. There’s a pressing need to change the way we approach health care, including mental health. We must shift our focus from a symptom-centered approach to one centered around each person’s complex story and unique experiences. This is the approach I’ve taken in this book. You are uniquely, wonderfully you—your quest for optimal health and well-being should be just as singular as you are.

A month earlier, when I told her the pediatrician suspected a syndrome, her words were the singular wheel-hole around which all the chaos could spin, and I knew if I just focused on it, I’d stay clear-headed: Whatever she has, my sister had said, nothing will change the fact that she’s beautiful and we love her. I needed nothing so much as that sentence.

Do not knock on the door of advantage and benefit, for the Sufi focuses on the scent of the Singular Rose and the Sufi realizes that rose petals and thorns are both expressions of his or her Beloved.

The classics are singular narratives focusing on those privileged enough to know how to read and write - Fatima (The Candle and the Flame by Nafiza Azad)

The paradox is that, although (human) subjectivity is obviously not the origin of all reality, although it is a contingent local event in the universe, the path to universal truth does not lead through abstraction from it…to some “gray” objective structure—such a vision of a “subjectless” world is by definition just a negative image of subjectivity itself, its own vision of the world in its absence. Since we are subjects, constrained to the horizon of subjectivity, we should instead focus on what the fact of subjectivity implies for the universe and its structure: the event of the subject derails the balance, it throws the world out of joint, but such a derailment is the universal truth of the world. And, insofar as the subject is in its very core sexed, the only access to the Real for us is through the impasse of sexuation—through the impasses of sexuation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with traditional sexualized cosmologies (the universe as the eternal struggle between masculine and feminine principles). What this also implies is that the access to “reality in itself” does not demand from us that we overcome our “partiality” and arrive at a neutral vision elevated above our particular struggles—we are “universal beings” only in our full partial engagements. This contrast is clearly discernible in the case of love: against the Buddhist love of All, or any other notion of harmony with the cosmos, we should assert the radically exclusive love for the singular One, a love which throws out of joint the smooth flow of our lives.

The idea that the invisible realm is populated with beings (deities = angels) who are somehow relevant to human beings in the visible realm does not necessarily exclude a felt sense that behind all manifestation is just One Being. In monotheism, that Singularity is given a personal face (usually that of the “Creator”). In philosophical nondualism, the same Singularity is understood in abstract terms as an impersonal “It.” Both orientations have coexisted in India since time immemorial. Yoga operates with both a personalist conception of a Supreme Person (be it God or Goddess) and an impersonalist notion of an Absolute (often called brahman). Sometimes, as in the Bhagavad-Gītā (Lord’s Song), an attempt is made to integrate both ideas. Thus some forms of Yoga are more religiously oriented, while others tend to be more philosophical. For example, there are numerous religious elements connected with Bhakti-Yoga, the path of devotional self-surrender to the Higher Reality, whereas Jnāna-Yoga, the path of self-transcending wisdom, tends to be more philosophical or metaphysical. However, Yoga’s growing technology of physical and mental practices came to be associated with a nondualist (advaita) metaphysics. According to the earliest teachings of Hindu nondualism, as contained in the Upanishads, the multifaceted world is an emanation from the singular transcendental Reality called brahman (“that which thrives”).5 Yoga was introduced as a way back to that Singularity (eka). The sages experienced that unitary Reality, which is supraconscious and utterly blissful, as being the core not only of the whole universe but also of the human personality. As the core of the personality it was called “Self,” or ātman. The Sanskrit term yoga was accordingly redefined as the “union” between the lower or embodied self and the transcendental Self (ātman), and this is still the prevalent understanding of the word inside and outside India. However, even Yoga as union includes an element of yoking, for the lower self cannot merge into the higher Self without proper focusing of attention.

Anxiety has the capacity to temporarily steal joy. It can wrangle the mind—baiting it to singularly focus on negative possibilities, whether true or false. In so doing, anxiety surreptitiously stomps out a spectrum of other feelings that actually exist simultaneously.

The focus on lived experience by identity groups valorizes inner selves experienced emotionally rather than examined rationally. Notes one observer, “Our political culture is marked, at the micro level, by the fusion of a given person’s opinion and what they perceive to be their singular, permanent, and authentic self.” This privileges opinions sincerely held over reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon those opinions. That an argument is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen as sufficient to delegitimize it, a trend encouraged by the kind of short-form discourse propagated by social media.

Fundamentally, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were trying to shift our perspective from focusing on I and me and mine to we and us and ours. Earlier in the week the Dalai Lama had referenced a classic study that suggested the constant use of personal pronouns leads to a greater risk of heart attack. In a multicenter prospective study of coronary heart disease, health researcher Larry Scherwitz found that people who more frequently said I, me, or mine had a higher risk of having a heart attack and had a higher risk of their heart attack being fatal. Scherwitz found that this so-called “self-involvement” was a better predictor of death than smoking, high cholesterol levels, or high blood pressure. A more recent study conducted by researcher Johannes Zimmerman found that people who more often use first-person singular words—I and me—are more likely to be depressed than people who more often use first-person plural—we and us. This was interesting evidence that being too self-regarding really does make us unhappy