„You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.“ Mark Twain
„Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.“ Alexander Graham Bell
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.“ Steve Jobs
„I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.“ Venus Williams
„My approach to every game was to try to erase the games that were before and try to focus on the game at hand.“ Cal Ripken, Jr.
About the dignity of work and the rights of workers the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops writes:
„The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in God’s creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected: the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative.“
Isolate: To cause a person or place to be or remain alone or apart from others; to identify something and examine or deal with it separately.
Simplicity: The quality or condition of being easy to understand or do; the quality or condition of being plain or natural; a thing that is plain, natural, or easy to understand. Late Middle English. From Old French simplicite or Latin simplicitas, from simplex.
Sophistication: The quality of being sophisticated; development to a high degree of complexity; the quality of being aware or and able to interpret complex issues; the characteristic of having, revealing, or proceeding from a great deal or worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture. From medieval Latin sophisticatus, “tampered with”.
Elegance: The quality of being graceful and stylish in appearance or manner; the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple; neatness.
KISS: The acronym for “keep it simple, stupid” is attributed to Kelly Johnson, an engineer at the U.S. weapons company Lockheed. Although there are several other variations, the principle states that systems work best if they are kept simple. Complexity should be avoided. Johnson had given a team of design engineers a set of tools, then challenged them to design a jet aircraft which can be repaired by an average mechanic under war conditions with these tools only.
There is nothing original about KISS, however. To Leonardo da Vinci is attributed “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. Mies van der Rohe, widely regarded as one of the masters of modern architecture, stated time and again that “less is more”. Antoine de Saint Exupéry, the French aristocrat, poet, writer (The Little Prince) and pioneering aviator has been quoted: “It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
William of Ockham (1288-1348), an English Franciscan friar and one of the major figures of Medieval thought, wrote that “among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected”.
Transcendentalism was an American philosophical movement that began in the early 19th century. Transcendentalists emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and avoiding conformity.
Many of the transcendentalists’ suggestions for how to live life were based on the assumption of readily-available resources, and especially on the idea that one shouldn’t be too careful about wasting resources, because often good things come out of failure.
The New York Times online. May 3, 2015. An interview with Diane von Fürstenberg, Belgian-born American fashion designer best known for her iconic wrap dress.
Interviewer: You’ve had such a roller coaster life of great successes, as well as some pretty dark times. How did you manage through all that?
von Fürstenberg: I’m still managing through it. First of all, let’s talk about success. I lived an American dream. I was very lucky because I was very successful at 25 years old. Now it’s very common for that to happen in Silicon Valley. But at the time, it was not so common, and I was a woman and I was very young.
Now we go to failure. What does failure mean? You didn’t make it? So you didn’t make it. But by not making it, maybe you learned something else. America is a society where you always have a chance and where you can always make a comeback. So I would say that failure sometimes could be your biggest asset.
Americans are skeptical of business processes that attempt to replace human judgment. They believe that decision-making is inherently human. Drawing on personal and professional experience, intuition and judgment, a person or a group of persons makes the decision. Processes have neither experience, nor intuition nor judgment.
Analysis defines the situation, the options, their respective risks and benefits. Experience informs about how the situation could/should be dealt with. And intuition influences the decision.
Decision: A conclusion or resolution reached after consideration; the action or process of deciding something or of resolving a question; a formal judgment; the ability or tendency to make decisions quickly; decisiveness. From Latin decidere “determine”.
Analysis: Detailed examination of the elements or structure of something, typically as a basis for discussion or interpretation; the process of separating something into its constituent elements; the identification and measurement of the chemical constituents of a substance or specimen.
In 1965, during the first manned flight of the Gemini program, American astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich onto the Gemini 3 spacecraft. One part of the Gemini 3 mission had been to test the effects of food on the astronauts, and also to see how well the two men onboard could work and eat efficiently and how bad the mess and odor would be.
Each official item of food had been specifically prepared as part of the test, however, unbeknownst to NASA (or even to his co-astronaut), Young decided to make an addendum to the prepared menu.
The sandwich did not fare well in space and made such a mess that the effects of the prepared food were largely untestable. Although Young was officially reprimanded for his action, this deviation in the accepted process did not damage his career, and he later landed on the moon in the Apollo 16 mission and piloted the space shuttle.
Rogue – vagrant, tramp, scoundrel; a horse inclined to shirk or misbehave; an individual exhibiting a chance and usually inferior biological variation; to weed out inferior, diseased, or nontypical individuals from a crop plant or a field; used to describe something or someone that is different from others in usually a dangerous or harmful way. First known use in 1766.
The Americans tendency to treat rules more as guidelines even extends to their Constitution. In Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution there is a clause which is known colloquially as the Elastic Clause.
This clause gives Congress the ability to add, remove, or change laws as its members see fit. This can include in the judicial system – if a person breaks a law, the court can decide to ignore it and grant the accused clemency, or if a person doesn’t break a law and is taken to court, the court can decide that he/she is guilty anyway.