“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)
“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)
“How to talk to people.
1. Listen.
2. Look them in the eyes (I struggle here).
3. Set your phone on silent & leave it face down on the table.
4. Don’t make small talk (everyone knows it’s cold).
5. Listen.
6. Don’t agree just for the sake of agreeing.
7. Don’t disagree just for the sake of disagreeing.
8. Listen.
9. Say something interesting.
10. Leave them better than you found them.
11. Listen.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 39)
“When you hate someone,
be certain you’re hating them,
not the fabricated version of them
you’ve created in your head.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 29)
“When you talk to people whose worlds are burning down you keep your voice quiet, steady, still and consistent. Your voice controls the energy in the room and in many ways it controls the emotions of the individual in front of you.”
Eugene, via One Minute, Please? (Page 25)