Chapter 6

p1 - You should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.

p2 - When you take responsibility for something,you enter into a contract to take care of it.

Chapter 9

p5 - her greatest advantage… is that she is not complicated

p6 - slower than most of the other boats

p7 - Skilled maintainers advise never trying to solve a new or complex problem without a thorough mulling first.

p8 - his leak was fixed.

p9 - Necessity is the mother of invention and I am always quite happy to leave things until I have to cope with them,and then throw myself happily into the problem.”

p9 - three days repairing the rudder.

p12 - Doing maintenance cures depression.

p12 - He had to devote three hours every day solely to tasks that would keep the boat sound enough to get all the way home.

p12 - I was thoroughly enjoying myself.”

p12 - The only way to overcome my present feeling of depression is to fully occupy myself

p13 - Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.

p13 - Unfortunately, the 35-year-old Crowhurst was too much of an optimist to take into account the complications that always arise between having an idea and getting it to work.

p15 - Optimists like Crowhurst—and me, I confess—tend to resent the need for maintenance and resist doing it. Maybe we prefer to think in ideals, and the gritty reality of things constantly decaying and breaking offends our sense of the world.

p16 - Crowhurst was so good at fixing radios that he sought out reasons to do it while neglecting everything else.

p16 - It was his last sane day.

p17 - reality could be stipulated by a sufficiently brilliant mind.

p18 - He had invested so much of himself in an illusion that when it shattered, he shattered.

p20 - The boat was designed and built to be low maintenance, highly durable, and simple to handle solo.

p22 - Only simple things, he noted, can be reliably repaired with what you have on board.

p22 - With less stuff, there was less to maintain

p23 - He thought about the problem for two nights and a day before proceeding

p24 - His reward for a boat functioning like new every day was this: “I spend my time reading, sleeping, eating. The good, quiet life, with nothing to do.

p24 - His years at sea had taught him that if you don’t fix something when you first see it beginning to fail, it is very likely to finish failing just when it is the most dangerous and the hardest to deal with

p24 - Moitessier loved doing routine maintenance.

p25 - continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.32

p25 - “I really felt sick at the thought of getting back to Europe, back to the snakepit.”30 He asked himself, “How long will it last, this peace I have found at sea?

p26 - Crowhurst’s final writings amounted to the most completely documented account of a psychological breakdown…

p28 - 303 days after leaving England, worn out from 37,455 miles at sea—which is still considered “the world’s longest recorded nonstop solo sailing voyage.” 34

p29 - Knox-Johnston’s style was:“Whatever comes, deal with it.” And he did.Crowhurst’s was:“Hope for the best.” It killed him.Moitessier’s was:“Prepare for the worst.” It freed him.

Chapter 10

p2 - The books are Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work and Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

p3 - There was more thinking going on in the bike shop,” he notes, “than in my previous job at the think tank.”3

p5 - finding comes before problem solving:

p5 - The need for maintenance doesn’t stop when usage stops.

p5 - The upkeep of any machine is largely about tending to the four sources of most problems: moving parts, flowing fluids, flowing electricity, and temperature stresses. Every bit of the moving, flowing, and stressing causes wear and tear, but damage also comes from not moving,flowing, or stressing.

p6 - Part of pragmatic diagnosis is being realistic about when to abandon repair and think about buying a new motorcycle or giving up on riding.

p7 - Maintainers learn to be causation experts when dealing with repair.

p8 - “Angering. Infuriating. That’s what makes it interesting.”

p8 - Just stare at the machine

p8 - Patience.

p9 - Impatience is another form of agitation that can lead to rushing into big mistakes.

p9 - leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. I call these things‘gumption traps.’”48

p9 - Value rigidity is one hang-up in mechanics

p11 - Driven by bad mechanics to become his own good mechanic

p11 - essence of that relationship is caring.

p11 - to become expert at keeping anything in good repair, you need to understand it in two ways: how it works and how it’s made.

Chapter 11

p16 - A nice fat spark at all four spark plugs would impress bystanders and tell you the ignition was okay, so it must be a fuel problem. You would then have to start at the gas tank (empty?) and its vent (blocked?), then—groan—the carburetor. You would examine the spray needle setting, the choke valve, the drain valve, and so on.

p16 - The owner had to learn certain skills to keep the car running

p17 - A Rolls-Royce, impressive as it was, had just one use.

p17 - the power to maintain is the power to improve.

Chapter 12

p3 - idea of interchangeable parts was something new in the world.

p4 - In 1785, Blanc stunned French government officials with a public demonstration before a large audience. He disassembled 25 lock assemblies, tossed the dozens of separate parts into boxes, and shook the boxes. With parts randomly selected from each box, he reassembled 25 new locks. They all worked perfectly.

p5 - Blanc’s use of gauges to make interchangeable parts did indeed threaten the practices of the gunsmith’s guild. But the guild, like others at that time, was secretive, intensely protective, conservative,and politically powerful.

p5 - It protected its members at the expense of their customers, who had to put up with guns that were often shoddy and always expensive.

p5 - toward efficiencies that favored the middle classes, toward techniques that put the honest work of artisans and craftsmen to disadvantage.

p8 - early steps in the process looked promising.

p8 - the “uniformity system”

p10 - Work previously done by 75 men now required only 17.

p17 - in France, an equally determined bureaucrat prevented the Industrial Revolution from taking root in his nation for half a century by enforcing his belief that social harmony was more important than manufacturing uniformity.

p18 - Wherever it can be introduced as a substitute for manual labor, it is universally and willingly resorted to.”100

p19 - Samuel Colt invented product placement advertising. In 1855

p24 - In 1878, Pope started importing “high-wheel” bicycles from England. Then he took over an old rifle factory in Connecticut that had been converted to a sewing machine factory and converted it into a bicycle factory.

Chapter 13

p4 - Farms and ranches had always depended on do-everything-yourself skills. A kid growing up there spent all day on maintenance chores, learning from older family members and ranch hands how to fix the tractor, mend barbed wire fences, manage the wood stove, and do the laundry. By the early 20th century, servants were disappearing in towns and home ownership was taking off. By the1950s, doing one’s own home repair and improvement became a popular weekend pastime. Retired men had a shop in the basement or garage. Teenagers hot-rodded their cars.

p9 - idle for at least half a minute

p9 - low maintenance sells.

p9 - ninety percent of engine wear happens in the first fifteen minutes of operation

p10 - The universal advice from professional maintainers to every impatient equipment misuser is an expletive: “Read the fucking manual!” By which they mean: Part of taking proper ownership of something is to study its manual first.

Chapter 14

p12 - Arthur Herman’s 1997 book The Idea of Decline in Western History makes a persuasive case that Rousseau’s anti-rational Romanticism directly inspired two centuries of gaseous, heroic, often suicidal pessimism about civilization

p12 - Rousseau declared, “Everything degenerates in the hands of men.”139 Nietzsche echoed, “There is an element of decay in everything that characterizes modern man.”

p33 - Old systems fail in familiar and prepared-for ways. New systems fail in unexpected and unprepared-for ways.

p40 - The M16 required assiduous maintenance to function at all, and its design made maintenance difficult. The famed cartoonist Will Eisner spent a month visiting troops in the field before writing and illustrating this1969 comic book manual

p42 - “Do not interchange bolt assemblies from one rifle to another. Doing so may result in injury,or death of, personnel.”166

p46 - “The M16’s journey was marked by salesmanship, sham science, cover-ups, chicanery, incompetence, and no small amount of dishonesty by a gun manufacturer and senior American military officers.”

p49 - . In 1990, Eugene Stoner (left, with his M16) met Mikhail Kalashnikov (right, with his AK-47). They traveled together and became friends. In many of the world’s wars since 1965, the two guns have been on opposite sides. (Chris Lawson, Marines)

p49 - The answer to all these requirements was simplicity.

p50 - AK-47 had just 73 parts.

p50 - continuous paring down

p50 - “forgiveness.” It forgave neglect.

p50 - “The combined bolt and gas piston were…massive, and by giving these parts heft, the designers provided the AK-47’s operating system an abundance of energy every time a shot was fired… to push through any dirt or accumulated carbon inside the weapon.”176

p50 - The snazzy M16 had 144 parts and required “surgical” care

p61 - Sometimes he’d even open a YouTube video in the operating theater when confronted with a particularly challenging surgery or

Chapter 15

p1 - Corrosion: Rust Never Sleeps

p9 - annual corrosion costs at $20 billion: the US military.

p16 - gift

p16 - Only gold and platinum are corrosion-free.

p18 - maintenance mistakes.

p18 - management kept changing

p21 - It was just a maintenance project.

p21 - (The ongoing maintenance budget for the statue these days, I’m told, is about $6 million a year: $5 million for managing public access and $1 million for physical maintenance.

Chapter 16

p1 - Poor Maintenance Loses Wars

p8 - Israeli tank crews had the skills and tools to maintain and repair their tanks; the Egyptian crews didn’t.

p16 - maintenance prowess is core to rapid adaptivity under duress

p19 - decentralized execution to operate at the speed of the problem.”

p19 - Never tell people how to do things

p20 - never make a decision that someone at a lower level could make.

p21 - commanders focus on the purpose of the operation rather than on the details of how to perform assigned tasks

p25 - maintaining most often refers to actions taken to correct or avoid problems, while sustaining is a more general strategic term referring to the management of the evolution of a system

p25 - The best-known socio-ecological definition of sustainability (attributed to the “Brundtland Report”) is commonly paraphrased as “development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”247

p48 - If there is too much social distance between officers and troops with nobody connecting them, maintenance will always be low-status and poorly supervised—a perfect formula for institutional neglect mind

Chapter 17

p1 - Progress comes in distributed increments rather than concentrated leaps.

p4 - The 12 moving parts of the electric motor and drivetrain provide power to the wheels at approximately 90 to 95 percent efficiency. A combustion engine is lucky to get 30 to 35 percent, meaning that 65to 70 percent of its energy is wasted as heat, vibration, friction, and noise.

p6 - This five-liter can of petrol contains 45 kilowatt hours of energy, but it only weighs 3.7 kilos. That makes 12.2 kilo[watt] hours per kilogram…That is very energy dense… [This lead-acid battery] weighs 16 kilos, and it’s got 0.84 kilowatt hours of energy in it, which gives it an energy density of 0.05 kilowatt hours per kilogram. So compare the 0.05kilowatt hours per kilogram to the 12.2 [kilowatt hours per kilogram],and you can see why petrol won that race for so long… [The Tesla P100lithium-based battery technology gets] 0.22 kilowatt hours per kilogram… But it’s still nowhere near the 12.2 kilowatt hours per kilogram of petrol.

Chapter 18

p1 - Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10 percent of them, then you didn’t delete enough.

p1 - Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it.…

p1 - Simplify and optimize.

p2 - Accelerate cycle time.

p2 - Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned,parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.2

p2 - I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realised should have been deleted.

p3 - “Earn to give” as a strategy for doing good has a way of scrambling the giver’s incentives.