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Comment by kitbrennan | Hacker News Reader

`Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance`

The book looks at what it means to say something has 'quality'.

It didn't teach me any new philosophical methods or theories, but it did make me look at my own work differently and start asking: how can I make something with the highest quality? What compromises that quality? What is a method that leads to the highest quality?

Translating that to my business life: in the startup scene I've scene a lot of startups treat lean as gospel (myself included at one point), and as a result they compromise on the quality that both themselves and their customers are happy with. So I certainly found it useful to have a book that made me think about this.

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I haven't read the book, but isn't quality something of a continuum dictated mostly by economics? In other words, if you put huge efforts into making quality products that are really more than most customers need, and it costs you do to so, you're likely going to go out of business. That, or you'd do best to find a niche where people really do need that kind of quality.

Yes, the "quality" referred to in the book is a spiritual, metaphysical quality that does not exist in reality, but makes for decent reading.

I've read the book and I think it was crap. It didn't have a good story and it didn't have a good message. It was so bad I've forgotten entirely why I didn't like it, because I've forgotten the whole thing.

I'm sure this will get downvoted; it seems that HN has gotten pretty religious lately. I guess it's the effect of coders getting old and searching for order in a chaotic world.

Read the book.

If you haven't read this book, do. Absolutely and without question life-changing.

Also contains the best description and explanation of the scientific method I've ever read - so good that I put the book on the curriculum of a course on online advertising I ran this year!

I'd definitely n+1-th this recommendation, if only because I strongly dislike dualistic thinking and have an enormous soft spot for anything that picks it apart.

This book deeply influenced me last year. I think it is one of the best books I've read among 500+ other.

"Do you teach students quality?" is a question I'll remember forever.

Highly recommended.

I'm 46 and have read it 3 times over the past 25 years. Definitely a book that changed my life!

I'm 28 and I've read it 3-4 times now. It's a truly an inspired work. I think that it would appeal to the HN community because the author, Robert Persig, arguably reaches a statement of enlightenment entirely through deductive reasoning. The story is essentially Persig's attempt to piece this whole event together after having undergone electric shock therapy. The story unfolds as Persig and his son travel across the US by motorcycle and is complemented by intermediary "chautauquas" (philosophical monologues) and technical monologues about motorcycle maintenance. The book is an enigma (unlike its sequel "Lila" which is not), and there isn't any other book that I've read that is like it.

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