“I’ve known great troubles, both mentally and emotionally, and many of them have been cured sitting alone in a room with a therapist. And, I’d argue just as many, if not more, have been cured spending fifteen to twenty minutes with my head on a women’s chest. Fucking is good. But it’s not medicine.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 132)
“Today, I no longer worry about being the best looking guy in the room. I want to be the smartest. I want to be the most creative. I want to be the most thoughtful. I want to be the most interesting. But, I couldn’t give a shit less about being the best looking. I want to be everything I wasn’t born to be. I want to be everything I’ve worked like hell to build.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 131)
“Approach life advice not like immutable laws but rather like trying on clothes. Some advice will fit you well and flatter you. Other advice will not. Advice that may work great on one person may work terribly on the next. Pick and choose your advice to suit your personality and the occasion. Feel free to discard old advice any time it stops working for you.”
Mark Manson
“There will be moments in your life
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 130)
when you stumble into someone and your whole
damn world will be flipped on its head, a complete stranger
will become the only person that matters and if I can
give you any piece of advice, it’s that in
these moments don’t let go.”
“Love, as I see it today, is very conditional. It’s this idea that as long as our partners fit within a specific set of conditions, constructs and expectations, we will continue to love them. That’s a bit fucked up in my opinion. I think we need to give our partners room to explore, to make mistakes, to grow and to experience this life to the fullest. I think we need to remember that we are loves, not keepers.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 124)
“When you live with the understanding that each moment might be your last, everything changes. You begin loving the people in your life harder. You begin sacrificing your body and soul to make good work. You begin living with an insatiable appetite to devour the moment you’re living in now. It will feel foreign but it will ignite your being. Death will no longer scare you as you come to the profound realization that the only death you truly face is not living fully now. So, please. I beg you. Devour this moment whole, my friend.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 122)
“I was jealous of other men where it concerned the women I was dating because I was scared of losing her to him. I was at war. Love should be many things but it should never be war. Jealousy was my body and mind’s way of doing everything I could to not be abandoned, to not feel that pain of someone leaving. As a result, I led an exhausting life. I couldn’t enjoy love or intimacy because I was so fucking terrified of losing it. Numerous people, both men and women alike, struggle with jealousy. We attempt to mask it in our relationships as being healthy or flattering, branding it as some sort of fucked up proof our partners care about us. But jealousy is not love. It’s selfishness. If we’re not careful, it’s an emotion that can quickly transform into possession. Let her keep her wings.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 112)
“Most of the hateful humans we run into on a daily basis are just growing up children, hurting. That’s heartbreaking. But it’s freeing. It gives us permission to be better to ourselves and our fellow humans.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 110)
“Falling for people through screens is dangerous. It’s fiction. It’s stranger than fiction. We’re not falling for people, but rather the idea of them we’ve fabricated in our own heads. It’s like falling in love with Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. After I read Hemingway, I fell in love with that women. But, I can’t take her to dinner because she doesn’t exist. And, that is our generation’s curse, falling for the pretty fiction behind glowing screens that we create in our own heads. At times, I wonder if our imaginations will be the death of any chance we have at love.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 108)
“We often confuse love with possession.
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 106)
Unlike our pets, humans weren’t meant to be kept on leashes.
They weren’t meant to be neutered and spayed.
Their wings weren’t meant to be clipped for the sake of your possession.
When you love someone, you love them unconditionally.
You love them not under the condition they’ll be here forever.
But, rather, that they chose to be here, for a moment or a lifetime.
Even though they could have flown anywhere.”
“A lot of rich people in this world live very poor lives. They’re rarely not thinking about money. About how to acquire more of it, about what they can trade in their life in exchange for it, about who they know who has more of it than they do. These poor souls know they have a lot of money, but what they don’t understand is that, really, money has a lot of them.”
Ryan Holiday
“Most vulnerability we see today
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 93)
isn’t true vulnerability.
It’s convenient vulnerability.
It’s being vulnerable to better one’s
position in the public eye.
It’s conditional vulnerability.
It’s this idea that one will only be
vulnerable in situations where it’s
advantageous to one’s self.
Being vulnerable should be a selfless act.
It’s making the difficult choice of sharing
raw painful truths in hopes to build
something beautiful from that suffering.”
“There’s little room for rationality in love. There’s room for compassion, honesty and forgiveness. But, if you’re approaching love with a sense of rationality, like it’s some black and white problem to be solved, you’re not truly loving. You might think you’re loving. But you’re not truly loving.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 86)
“There’s so much messaging today about how you always have to be yourself and trust your feelings. But I tell people, ‘be un-you.’ Like what is the opposite of what you feel like doing right now? Or who is someone you really admire—what would they do in this moment? And I actually think that can get us closer to the versions of ourselves that we would like to be…Separating oneself from one’s impulse, taking a healthy step back and gaining some distance between what you feel like doing and what’s actually going to help you—you’ll make a better choice.”
Dr. Samantha Boardman
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, via One Minute, Please? (Page 76)
“The creative does not live off wins. The creative lives off the work. That’s what keeps her nourished.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 66)
“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)