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Comment by mjberg01 | Hacker News Reader

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig takes you deep into the philosophy on what is 'quality'. Once you see it you can't unsee it.

A powerful excerpt from the book: 'So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces the right values, the right values produce the right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.'

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Despite all the praise it got, I really struggled with that book. I hated it so much that I had to check if I didn't pick the wrong book by accident. I found that it's a very polarising book. It's life-changing for some, and garbage for others.

There were a few insightful passages, but most of the book was pretentious rambling. It was difficult to understand what the author was even trying to say, with his head so far up his butt. It has a promising beginning, but becomes increasingly dense and confusing.

Quality is the ability of a thing to do its job. Chasing the definition of that word doesn't warrant a spiral into insanity.

> It's life-changing for some, and garbage for others.

I feel this way about Catcher in the Rye. My English teacher recommended it to me obviously on the basis that I was an angsty teenager that would identify with Holden Caulfield. But what a pile of crap it is. I still want back the hours I wasted on reading that stupid boring book.

It's a loathsome book for some people, even angsty teenagers, because not all of them are angsty for the same reasons.

I didn't enjoy it either when I was reading it, but later appreciated that it depicted a certain kind of angst— that of someone leaving childhood for adulthood, feeling anxious and threatened by this shift, and wishing to just remain as the most adult-like child (the "catcher in the rye" that gives the book its title) instead of having to go through that awkward period of being the most childlike adult.

Under that reading, it's much less irritating, because Holden isn't supposed to be valorized, just understood.

I loved Salinger's books when I was a teenager in the 80s. I just don't think his work is relevant today. The major themes are about how everyone else is a conformist and a phony. Both ideas have been turned inside out since Salinger wrote his books. What does being a "phony" mean if you're a YouTube star or say the President of the United States?

That's a weird recommendation. I think you might have viewed it differently as a bit of a retrospective or perspective piece.

I can't possibly so how the teacher thought suggesting that book to an angsty teen to be a good idea. That's the time kids need to have their world opened, not their angst re-affirmed. Very strange.

Thing is I was already reading some pretty bleak stuff at the time, e.g. Brave New World and 1984, and as you can probably imagine the trials of a mopey teenager didn't really impress much when put up against poor Winston and Room 101 etc.

Haha fair enough

This was required reading in a highschool English class. I really enjoyed it then.

Tried to read it again in my early 30s and stopped about 20 pages in, just thought it was terrible.

I found it to be an "atmospheric" (for the lack of a better word) book -- you understand by feeling as much as by, well, direct understanding. Kind of like Master and Margarita (which some people also find pedestrian).

I had a similar experience.

Reading secondary literature gave me some context about Pirsig's own mental illness and his struggles overcoming his son's death, but in the end I was still disappointed.

Edit: Also, it's not about motorcycles at all. If you are interested in motorcycle travel, read Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels instead.

I really wanted to like JT. But Simon is a poor writer who wanders as much on the page as he did on his bike. An an author he's no comparison with Pirsig who had much more to say than merely, "I went somewhere and saw something."

Better books on motorcycling are "Long Way Round" by McGregor and Boorman or anything by Peter Egan.

Pirsig's ZatAoMM is my all-time favorite book, though I didn't finish it at first reading. The trick before reading it is not to put the book into a cubbyhole of personal preexisting expectations. It's not a travel book. It's a personal journey of discovery that just happens to be on a motorcycle. Essentially, Pirsig's bike trip is a metaphor to revisit his fragmented past and forgotten identity through the lens of a curious mind. It's a personal quest to know who he is (and was) and what in life has value that lasts.

For me, the book was transcendent.

I read Jupiter's Travels right after. It's indeed a much better book about motorcycle travel. It's a very accurate depiction of what it's like to travel on a motorcycle. It still blows my mind that someone achieved this before ATMs, hotel booking sites and fuel injection.

I had read it when I was younger and thought much of the same thing. Years later someone taught me about mindfulness in a completely different context and after applying that thinking to other aspects of my life I picked that book up again. I was able to appreciate it much more the second time.

I came to the conclusion that the book is actually about mental illness, whether intentional or otherwise.

The first time I tried to read it, I got frustrated with his style and quit -- I had been skimming over the story parts to get to the philosophy, and it was exhausting. I liked it better the second time when I wasn't as rushed.

For me the takeaways were: 1. Getting into a state of 'flow' is the ideal way to work. 2. Being dependent on technology one doesn't understand (& hence on people who do understand it) is an unpleasant fact of modern life. 3. Our culture still hasn't shaken the tendency to denigrate pleasure, and the subjective in general.

Quality is ranking things or people by their properties. Things that suck at their job can still be ranked.

You have to balance the idea and quantity of a piece to describe it's properties. Then you can rank it into a hierarchy. The UK runs on this principle of reception and qualitative judgement.

Turning the brain off with "peace of mind" is necessary, can't be thinking up new ideas and directing thoughts when you are in a state of reception, nor can you be excessively self-aware of your own being.

I haven't read Zen, it seems boring to be in that state of reception all the time, to me.

> Quality is the ability of a thing to do its job.

He was an English teacher trying to judge the quality of rhetoric though, which doesn’t have a job other than to be quality.

I thought it worked as a story, but the philosophical insights of it were either junk or too subtle for me to understand.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have similar sentiments about Cohelo's Alchemist and even Ayn Rands fountainhead (didn't read the second book).

I tried this book and wanted to like it. I couldn't. There's something about that "lessons in disguise" type of style that doesn't click with me. I feel it tries too hard when those lessons and the analogies are things that could be explicitly said without so much ceremony. I also found the story itself rather boring.

I prefer a book like Siddartha by HH. The lessons are there, but the interpretation is open and the narrative is not compromised. You start reading it and you don't want to stop reading it because you're now part of Siddharta's journey. You’re no expecting the punch line that has the lesson, you simply live the story and therefore live the lesson.

Really tried hard reading that book given all the praise it got...but I just couldn't make it past like 20% mark

Once I moved to a new city and business wouldn't start until a few days later. Some time to spare, I walked into the first bookstore I saw on the street. There in the corner this book caught my attention, well, because I like motorcycles and thought the cover looks appealing.

Still the best random buy I ever did.

There is so much joy in picking up an unknown book from an unknown author in an actual bookshop, then reading it and discovering that it’s So Good, that Amazon just cannot match.

One of the things I really miss of my Italian youth is having tons of quality bookshops at every corner. England outside London is sorely lacking in that respect.

How would that work in a programming environment, to not separate one self from the surroundings?

There’s another great book on Zen called “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. I think what Persig is getting at is “non-judgmental observation”. The ability to look at things with no ego involved, like an absolute beginner — so that you’re mind is open to the solutions that naturally present themselves.

Both of these books had a big influence on Phil Jackson — the Bulls basketball coach. His interpretation was to not “force” things — to let them unfold.

So, for coding it could be applied by not forcing solutions and instead really calmly contemplating a system until you get to a point where the next right decision reveals itself. The idea being that the solution is there, and you just have to be open to it — rather than seeing yourself as some separate entity that’s going to impose a solution on it.

https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

> Prince Wang's programmer was coding software. His fingers danced upon the keyboard. The program compiled without an error message, and the program ran like a gentle wind.

"Excellent!" the Prince exclaimed. "Your technique is faultless!"

"Technique?" said the programmer, turning from his terminal. "What I follow is Tao -- beyond all techniques! When I first began to program, I would see before me the whole problem in one mass. After three years, I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without a plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off."

Prince Wang said, "Would that all of my programmers were as wise!"

Another legend said something similar in another field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhvBTy28VJM

> calmly contemplating a system until you get to a point where the next right decision reveals itself.

I think I am not getting it because that just sounds like thinking about things and designing stuff.

I mean, sometimes, I focus on getting the right primitives so that the rest of the decisions just naturally fall out from that, but I'm not sure that's what you meant.

In the book he uses the example of trying to get a stripped screw out of something. It’s a classic example of where a lot of people will kind of mindlessly make the problem worse. But when you approach it calmly, maybe it leads you to realize it just needs some oil applied to it, etc.

So, I think we’ve all been there with coding where in either a rush, or driven by ego to solve the problem in some impressive way, we kind of get ourselves tied up. But when we calm our mind, it’s easier to see, “oh, I can just leverage this little change”.

... The idea is that, simultaneously, categories are an extremely powerful intellectual tool, and also imprison your thoughts.

In general life, as an odd monkey wandering around a built environment, that's Zen. The categories being challenged include such fundamental ones as "Self/Other"

In coding, identifying categories and choosing to perceive them or ignore them is fundamental to debugging. "The variable claims it's $foo; but I see back there it was set to $bar...." Strip away a layer of assumptions, and look underneath at what is _really_ there.

Iterated, this is what leads you to understanding performance all the way down to the silicon.

A lot of decisions are based on choosing one of two actions. You can think of them as doors. "Do I pick Door A or Door B?"

Sometimes you know that Door A is by far the "right" choice, but maybe it's the harder one. Taking a minute to drop your ego may make the choice easier. "Yeah, A is hard now, but B will bring much more pain later."

It may help to frame you decisions based on the hypothetical "1000x programmer". You acknowledge that this programmer is the absolute best. Every choice they make is literary a life or death decision, so they always make the right choice. What would they do in this situation? They would write that unit test!

Other times you don't know which one is the "right" choice. In those cases it actually doesn't matter, does it? Worrying about what may happen if you choose "wrong" will not change what's on either side of the doors.

Choose one and get on to the next set of doors. If you weren't happy with the outcome don't beat yourself up over it, instead use what you learned to better inform your future decisions.

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