Concentration Tips from Encarta

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Columns/?article=ConcentrationIsKey>1=27004


Quote:

There's got to be more. People with phenomenal powers of concentration reveal it most dramatically when the context doesn't favor them. I'm thinking of a chef I knew years ago when I worked in a gourmet restaurant as a waiter. The dining room at that place was always whisper quiet, the kitchen always a madhouse. One night, I stepped into that chaos -- the ice machine had broken, a fight had erupted between two sous-chefs, someone was waving a knife -- and there was June, calmly stirring a sauce. Suddenly a pot of something caught fire. Pandemonium ensued; everybody rushed to douse the flames, but June never took her eyes off her sauce -- it wasn't her pot on fire. Later I asked if she had noticed the fire. She had. How then could she just ignore it? "I was making hollandaise," she said. "You have to watch it or it breaks."

That, my friends, is concentration on the hoof: It's not the ability to focus in the absence of distraction, but the ability to focus in spite of distraction.