Favorite Quotes

These are some of my favorite quotes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hope that this post, but minimally, these quotes will inspire you to read this book.

  • The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

  • If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. You ego isolates you from Quality reality.

  • […] most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to other who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes.

  • Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.

  • […] physical discomfort is only important when the mood is wrong.

  • Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

Quality

Quality is not a thing. It is an event. […] It is an event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.

Think of how you define Quality or things that you have recently said were of a high or low quality recently. Now, think of how someone you know well and if they would consider the same object of the same quality as you. With that little exercise, is Quality defined objectively or subjectively?

Defining Quality is a main theme of the book. The journey and struggle comes from the narrator and a past version of himself, namely Phaedrus, trying to define Quality. As he later finds out, once one classically dissects something, — e.g., defining Quality — the mystery and beauty disappear.

People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

Think of a what you consider a well-designed and colorful website. Maybe you consider this “high-Quality”, but someone who is colorblind may consider it “low-Quality” because buttons are hard to distinguish from backgrounds. Chapter 4 in Software Engineering at Google, titled Engineering for Equity, talks about subjective Quality in relation to software.

Quality is what you like.

The “System” defines Quality for us as what others like. But true Quality must be discovered by oneself rather than taught or told. However, this does not mean that one should build something that only works for oneself. Quality in its most impactful form inspires, eases and influences those who experience it.

[…] Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others.

Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial […]. It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just and objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you […]. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it is wrong until either the machine or your mind [i.e., your mental model] is changed.

The above quote reminds me of a book called The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. I haven’t read the book in it’s entirety, but I remember it talking about objects that force us to be conscious, when otherwise, we would be unconscious, such as a door handle that looks like it should be pushed, but the door actually operates by pulling.

I know my wife and sister would laugh if they read this because when I’m struggling with something doesn’t operate as I unconsciously think it should, I call it a “piece of junk” i.e., it is of low Quality.

Quality is not the result of the collision between subject and object, it is the cause of the subject and object.

I interpret this as we only truly notice the Quality of an object when either the object does its job extremely well, or poorly, compared to previous experiences with related objects. Otherwise, we do not become consciously aware of Quality. Therefore, Quality is precisely the unifying force between subject and object.

Such personal transcendence of conflicts with technology doesn’t have to involve motorcycles, of course. It can be at a level as simple as sharpening a kitchen knife or sewing a dress or mending a broken chair. The underlying problems are the same. In each case there’s a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what “looks good” and an ability to understand the underlying method to arrive at the “good” are needed. Both classic and romantic understandings of Quality must be combined.

“Fake”, veneer-like, Quality

When Quality is taught or forced and not learned or discovered by oneself through trials and tribulations, it is un- or under-appreciated, “fake” Quality. You may relate to ordering a piece of cheap furniture that didn’t look too bad online, but you knew was cheap, only to receive it and be surprised by the true lack of quality in person. You were probably upset and no longer excited to use that piece of furniture. It no longer eased your mind or solved your problem, but rather created new problem such as being extremely careful not to break it.

It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill.

Once you define or teach Quality, it no longer fully exists. For one to full To truly exist in full form, Quality must be discovered. It is with passion, gumption, persistence and the right attitude that help discover true Quality.

[Our culture has the tendency] to do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good.

Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme […]

The narrator talks about this conflict between reason — i.e., “the facts” — and quality — i.e., the attitude toward and intimacy with something. Reason is forced upon us by society and institutions. We aren’t given the opportunity to discover Quality intimately on our own. We are told what Quality is.

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability.

In the Aristotelian ways, as a student, you are expected to be a carbon copy of your teacher, who is a copy of their teacher and so on, clear back to Aristotle himself.

Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says.

When Quality is not discovered, but told, one will encounter extreme fear when in a situation where they aren’t given the answer.

[…] if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, the sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.

External influences of internal attitude

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

The “spectator” attitude is when one doesn’t intimately care about the object or task, but instead is focused on getting it done or getting it to “just work”, so that one can move on to the next task. The narrator describes this separation between what man is and what man does.

While the author mostly focuses on internal attitude towards the work that one does, I think it is important to mention that the way the work is “prescribed” is also important in motivating one’s internal attitude. If what one is asked to do is discussed as important or influential work, then one will be more motivated to spend a more significant percentage of their effort on the task.

A worker with a “forced mechanized existence” is someone who has little say in the work that they do; they are commanded, similar to a robot. Similarly, they are optimized to simply finish the work, not overachieve.

“Caring” is self-identifying with what it is that one’s doing. “When one has this feeling, then [they] also [see] the inverse side of caring, Quality itself” a “material reflection of a spiritual reality”.

I am extremely grateful and fortunate to be where I am today. I was curious about what the contributing factors were in the job offer for my current position, so I asked my colleague and manager. Both replied similarly, that it was my positive attitude, optimistic view and general enthusiasm for the work. I say this not to boast, but to help others who are curious about what is important. Sure, expertise is important. But expertise with the wrong attitude is extremely harmful to a team. This is why a lot of companies avoid hiring “brilliant jerks”.

Related to optimism and positivity and avoiding the “brilliant jerk” mentality, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator says, “If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.”

In software engineering, developers are often introduced to codebase that has existed for a while, doesn’t follow best practices or language idioms and has lots of “warts”. In these situations, developers often immediately start pointing out the warts and potential points of failure. While it can absolutely be helpful to have a new perspective, “name calling” solves nothing. Instead, influence the changes that you want to see through an optimistic and positive attitude.

Additionally, don’t be quick to judge, because often in the situations if you dig just below the surface — namely, use what Shane Perrish writes about, called Second Order Thinking — there are usually reasons these warts exist. Whether they developed over time or were added deliberately and just haven’t been fixed due to other priorities because time and effort could and still can be better utilized elsewhere.

Related specifically to intentionally-added warts, the narrator tells a story about a beer can shim to fix loose handlebars. However, the beer can shim was proposed to be added to his friend’s, “fancy”, BMW motorcycle. While functionally, the beer can shim was perfect, the fact that a literal piece of trash was being proposed as the fix offended the friend tremendously. The friend decided that he would rather deal with loose handlebars than to have a “hacky”, piece of trash fix his technological marvel of a bike.

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

Often our protecting ego — what the narrator calls “ego goals” — is what makes contributing to or adding “hacks” difficult. While it is important to evaluate “hacks”, avoiding them altogether without acknowledging them isn’t the best approach. If the hack has been evaluated, doesn’t have long-term negative impacts, improves existing state or Quality of the system at large and is able to be removed with a “real” solution, often these hacks are what allow us to incrementally improve our situations, “tightening of the handlebars”. This is an important lesson in the distinction between underlying form and immediate appearance that the narrator talks about throughout Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Classical Versus Romantic Thinking

[…] all understanding is in terms of underlying form.

Underlying form is the connectedness of functional components. The What, How, Where and Why. The blueprints of how things actually work.

You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss things in terms of their underlying form […]

The narrator in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance attaches names, specifically, “classical” and “romantic”, to the underlying form and immediate appearance ways of thinking, respectively. Classical or scientific thinking — i.e., regarding facts — is to think unemotionally in terms of underlying form. While to think based on immediate appearance and feelings is to think artistically or romantically. He continues throughout the book with this distinction.

[Classical thinking]’s purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known.

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.

There is power in understanding the time, place and importance of either mode of thinking. Not that one is always and exclusively better than the other. However, people become obsessed with their mode of thinking and neglect to acknowledge the importance of the other.

With classical thinking, once you intensely analyze or dissect and something, the beauty of it is gone. It is no longer mysterious or “magical”. It’s just pieces that are put together at many levels. The narrator talks about how you can indefinitely cut something up, but when you do this, you “kill” it. This process of cutting something up is a “death-birth continuity”. Something new is “birthed” and killed at each level.

Classical Thinking Challenges

In Chapter 9, the narrator talk about the application of the scientific method. The scientific method is a continuous process which involves applied skepticism, assumptions or hypotheses and recorded observations. The narrator talks about how the scientific method is useful for finding “answers” in levels of underlying form, but doesn’t work as well against scientific truths. With scientific truths, once proved “true”, they only remain fully true while they are not under continued investigation or skepticism.

[…] time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort.

As you continue to investigate a scientific truth, you are never getting any closer to an answer, only opening significantly more question and potential paths than can be thoroughly evaluated.

The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude […].

This means that as you try to move toward an unchanging truth through the application of the scientific method, you don’t move toward it, but rather move away from it as the multitude of unanswered questions increases.

The combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather, to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules that must guide the choice are extremely fine and delicate.

When presented with infinitely many choices to choose from, Quality — keeping in mind that Quality is relative to past experiences — is what helps us decide which paths to pursue.

The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one […] is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. [They have] to care!

The narrator says, that this continual process of opening new questions is a “genetic defect within the nature of reason itself” and argues that it is this characteristic of classical thinking that continues to increase the divide between classical and romantic thinkers. Romantic thinkers continue to move further away, while classical thinkers go infinitely deeper in it.

The Journey

Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

A few times in the book, as the narrator is driving on a less-frequently-traveled road adjacent to the highway, he talks about the lifeless-looking faces of the passengers in cars. These passengers have elected to optimize travel as to make it as short as possible. However, it is during the struggles of “traveling on the path less traveled” that we truly learn. In the classical thinking journey of diving deeper is when you are learning about the intricacies at many levels. If one optimizes this travel away by jumping directly to obtaining the answer, one doesn’t truly appreciate the fact.

The reality of your own nature should determine speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

A continuation of the quote above,

Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to and end but a unique event in itself […]. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the side of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.

Experience and A Priori Knowledge

Since all knowledge comes from sensory impressions and since there’s no sensory impression of substance itself, it follows logically that there is no knowledge of substance. It’s just something we imagine. It’s entirely within our own minds.

From what sense data is our knowledge of causation received? In other words, what is the scientific empirical basis of causation itself? […] Hume’s answer is ‘None’ […] it’s just something we imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another […] then one must logically conclude that both ‘Nature’ and ‘Nature’s Laws’ are creations of our own imagination.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a priori is defined as “deductive” or “relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions”. The author talks about a priori knowledge and how while knowledge begins with experience, it doesn’t always necessarily come from experience. In other words, one doesn’t need exhaustive experience to think or discover knowledge continuously.

This a priori motorcycle has been built up in our minds over many years from enormous amount of sense data and it is constantly changing as new sense data comes in.

We are continuously creating, screening and tweaking our mental models of our surroundings. While new experiences bring inspiration, they also bring bounds to our imagination. The way one experienced something may differ from the way someone else experienced the same exact thing and therefore, both individuals have slightly differing mental models of the same object. These diverse experiences and mental models, used collectively, help us continue to expand our personal and future persons’ mental models.

“[R]oot expansions of thought” are lateral moves that we “drift” toward that help us deal with new, possibly unrelated, problems.

[…] most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to other who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes.

The early climbers established paths that were on firm ground with an accessibility that appealed to all, but today, the Western routes are all but closed because of dogmatic inflexibility in the face of change.

A mentor of mine jokes about the “dogmatic inflexibility” of programming language communities and how it creates barriers to entry for newcomers, but also shifts focus from solving problems to solving dogmatisms.

A Priori Knowledge Paralysis

The quote “start with the top-left brick” from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Dr. Richard Hamming’s talk, You and Your Research, given at Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar on March 7th 1986 have been influential in reminding me to pause and focus on digestible subproblems — i.e., “divide and conquer” over a lifetime — and to actually think on my own rather than search for the answers from others.

From Your and Your Research,

[…] plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow.

[…] solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far.

Our minds are often paralyzed by trying to repeat and imitate the thoughts and ideas of those before or surrounding us, rather than thinking of novel, unique thoughts.

There is a story told by the narrator in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about a past student of his who was instructed to write a five-thousand word essay about the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. This task along with having students write about the back of one of their thumbs was to teach them to see and think on their own and to not rely on those before or around them.

As with many things in life, I think there is a pendulum that needs to be in equilibrium. We can’t entirely neglect the experiences of those before or around us, but we also need to bring our own unique and new ideas.

I subscribe to the 30x40 Design Workshop YouTube channel, where the creator calmly walks you through the architectural process. Something that he said that stuck with me, is that one of the most important components of teaching someone how to draw architectural diagrams is to teach them how to see for themselves.

When you see for yourself, your attitude toward a particular topic changes. You feel connected and empowered.

Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.

To continue this quote,

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

It is in times of stuckness that we begin to unleash our beginners mind and fearlessly take original, possibly “wrong” paths.

[…] stuckness is gradually eliminating patterns of traditional reason.

Persistent Gumption

If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.

The narrator describes “gumption traps” which are low-quality things that one encounters while working through a problem that drain gumption and leave one feeling exhausted and discouraged. There are both internal and external gumption traps. A common problem that one faces when dealing with or overcoming a gumption trap is what the narrator calls “gumption desperation”, which is when on tries to rush to “catch back up” in an attempt to restore gumption after being set back by a trap. But gumption desperation only leads to more problems, so avoid it.

Remember that having to take something apart and put it back together a few times isn’t a setback if knowledge is gained in the process that will help in the future.

Internal Gumption Traps

  • “value traps” - blocks of affective understanding
  • “truth traps” - blocks of cognitive understanding
  • “muscle traps” - blocks of psychomotor behavior

Value traps

“Value traps are by far the largest and the most dangerous group”. Of these, “value rigidity” — or “being stuck in your ways” and being unable to revalue due to commitments to previous values — is the most prevalent and pernicious. To avoid value rigidity, always be aware of your ability to revalue. He says to have “value fluidity”.

[…] recognize a value trap when you’re in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.

The narrator talks about how we come to posses rigid values because we don’t have the cognitive capacity to hold all possible truths and it’s just easier to be rigid in our ways.

When you are dealing with value rigidity, slow down, step back and just observe the machine.

“Ego gumption” is when you have a high evaluation of yourself and your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. This is another trap that he says isn’t entirely separate from value rigidity because in order to retain one’s ego, one often believes that they must stand by their values indefinitely. In other words, “[one’s] ego isolates [them] from Quality reality”. He suggests that if modesty isn’t easy for you, keep faking modesty until the facts continuously prove that you were wrong.

These false [personality] images are deflated so rapidly and completely you’re bound to be very discouraged very soon if you’ve derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality.