Oakley Glasses Quotes

This was the tedious process by which I found great writers, like Greg Daniels (creator of The Office) and Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who three years later had my job running the show. In both cases, they had written pitch-perfect Seinfeld scripts. Greg’s was set entirely in a single parking space and was so good that Seinfeld actually produced it. Bill and Josh’s script had George Costanza accidentally swallowing a jagged piece of glass at a party; all the guests stay for hours, waiting to see if George “passes” the glass safely. It was cringe comedy at its very best.

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I’ve spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expected. The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of déjà vu. Déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems. Without a vuja de event, Warby Parker wouldn’t have existed. When the founders were sitting in the computer lab on the night they conjured up the company, they had spent a combined sixty years wearing glasses. The product had always been unreasonably expensive. But until that moment, they had taken the status quo for granted, never questioning the default price. “The thought had never crossed my mind,” cofounder Dave Gilboa says. “I had always considered them a medical purchase. I naturally assumed that if a doctor was selling it to me, there was some justification for the price.” Having recently waited in line at the Apple Store to buy an iPhone, he found himself comparing the two products. Glasses had been a staple of human life for nearly a thousand years, and they’d hardly changed since his grandfather wore them. For the first time, Dave wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone? Anyone could have asked those questions and arrived at the same answer that the Warby Parker squad did. Once they became curious about why the price was so steep, they began doing some research on the eyewear industry. That’s when they learned that it was dominated by Luxottica, a European company that had raked in over $7 billion the previous year. “Understanding that the same company owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames and sunglasses—all of a sudden, it made sense to me why glasses were so expensive,” Dave says. “Nothing in the cost of goods justified the price.” Taking advantage of its monopoly status, Luxottica was charging twenty times the cost. The default wasn’t inherently legitimate; it was a choice made by a group of people at a given company. And this meant that another group of people could make an alternative choice. “We could do things differently,” Dave suddenly understood. “It was a realization that we could control our own destiny, that we could control our own prices.” When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian Jean Baker observes. As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.

Cat packed the truck, suddenly struck with nervousness. They were about to completely flip their lives on end on the mere hope that they could be together as a family again. Her parents were not going to be overjoyed. Just then Harper walked out of the house. His straight dark hair was almost an inch long now, but it looked really good on him. For years it had never been much longer than a half inch. The granny shades had been retired, replaced with a reflective set of wraparound Oakleys. When he had those glasses on you couldn’t even see the scars. That sharp jaw had been shaved clean, just like she liked it. His body was well on the mend. Every once in a while she caught him wincing as he reached for something, but those times were fewer and farther between. As he hefted his duffle into the back of the truck her eyes traced down his magnificent body. The new blue jeans cupped his ass to perfection and the knife she had given him was snugged into the corner of his pocket. The Damascus blade had been packed away with care. The black Henley shirt he had stretched on over his massive chest and taut abs made his eyes look even more silver. He considered the color tactical but she just considered it sexy. When he looked up at her and graced her with one of his rare smiles she couldn’t help but return it. Yes, she had hope. More than enough for all of them.

The runner sped past a woman pushing a lime green jogging stroller. Despite his fast pace, the jogger didn’t look winded. Adjusting his white Adidas cap as he turned into the public park, he scanned the area from behind Oakley running glasses. His brown hair could barely be seen peeking out.

You love him,” Oakley says, a hint of awe in his voice. “Don’t you?” Leave it to my best friend to see right through me like I’m nothing more than a piece of glass. I bite the inside of my cheek, and before I realize it, I nod. “With every inch of me.