“The moment we find ourselves feeling bored, sad, anxious or complacent we reach for our phones, a prescription or a self-help book. We’ve become terrified of feeling anything negative. I’m not going to point a finger, but if someone held a gun to my head and told me to point a finger, I’d point to Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. I’d say we were due. I’d say that when you have an entire society overly focused on sharing the upper 1% of their days in a virtual world 24/7, we were bound to create some deep-rooted fears and insecurities around negative emotions. Now, we are forced to reap what we have sown.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 64)
“Mike Schur, co-creator of Parks and Recreation, said of his career, ‘This is not stuff you can read in a book,’ he said. ‘This is stuff that you have to experience.’ I think it’s also useful to flip it around. There are things you will have trouble experiencing until you read them in a book. A useful non-fiction book is a map, not the territory. It’s a chance to safely experience what might be, to experience it before it happens. And a book makes it easy to talk about what you’re doing. It gives you the structure and the words to explain to someone else why they might want to come along with you on the journey.”
Seth Godin
“Like the volcano or the Phoenix, the creative process is an inferno that makes room for something new, something brilliant, something lovely. It’s messy. It’s bloody. It’s demanding. It’s rigorous. But, it’s also human. We destroy things not out of hatred but out of love—to make room to till the soil and plant the seeds of our vision. So, when you find yourself feeling self-destructive, don’t panic. Instead, reflect. What vision are you subconsciously making room for?“
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 62)
“A few short rules worth living by: 1) Make good art. 2) Live fast. 3) Pet dogs. 4) Give without expectation. 5) Say nice things to others, daily. 6) Leave people better than you found them. 7) Buy experiences more often than products. 8) Always make time for coffee with people you care about.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 50)
“Be thankful for the hurt.
Find meaning in the hurt.
And,
understand every moment that it hurts
represents another moment
you’re alive
and breathing
and living
and loving
and experiencing
all the beauty
this world has to offer.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 48)
“Do not live half a life
and do not die a half death.
If you choose silence,
then be silent.
When you speak,
do so until you are finished.
If you accept,
then express it bluntly.
Do not mask it.
If you refuse
then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal
is but a weak acceptance.
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes.
Half the way will get
you nowhere.
You are a whole that exists
to live a life.
Not half a life.”
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
“While competition certainly makes sense in the world of sports—where at the end of each game somebody wins and somebody loses—there’s no place for competition in the arts. One way to determine whether or not art is ‘successful’ is if it’s original. Ironically, it’s impossible to be original in the arts if you’re competing with another artist, because to compete is to agree you are playing the same game. And so in art, to compete is to lose.”
Cole Schafer
“It’s not too late to get back on track. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve fallen, how harsh the crowd is looking at you, how mad they rightfully are. All you need to focus on is returning to your principles, returning to the worship of reason, returning to the habits and practices and arete that made you great in the first place. This won’t be easy, but it is simple. And it can be quick.”
Ryan Holiday
“Sometimes, I wonder if we hurt others because we feel lonely in our own pain.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 45)
“I couldn’t tell you what I fear
more. Spending the rest of my life
with just one person. Or, never
finding one person I want to spend
the rest of my life with.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 43)