Hurry
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Choose the experiences in life that offer the most anecdotal value — that is, look for the opportunities that have the most likelihood of producing a cool story.
At the The Moth Chicago Grand Slam this year Peter Sagal (yes, that Peter Sagal) relayed these words of wisdom, passed on to him by a theater professor at Lewis and Clark College many years before.
With a tip of the hat to The Moth, make it a story-worthy life.
Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you will be a mile away and he won’t have any shoes.
— Unknown
How could I resist? After yesterday’s exhortation to embrace empathy, it seemed only fitting to also quote a brilliant variation on the old moccasins quote.
It turns out that the above quote is a perfect example of a paraprosdokian – a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first part. Other good examples include my previous post from Ellen DeGeneres or my all time favorite, “When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather did . . . and not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.”
Underground nuclear testing, defoliation of the rain forests, toxic waste … Let’s put it this way: if the world were a big apartment, we wouldn’t get our deposit back.
— John Ross