I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college. I’ve read it at least a half dozen times since. I’ve listened to it on Audible twice. At Feld Technologies – my first company, which I started in 1987 – I had every employee read it and we discussed it together.
Ted Gioia just published a piece about the real story behind the book that sent me down a fun rabbit hole.
I knew the broad strokes of Robert Pirsig’s life. He was a Korean War veteran who studied philosophy at Banaras Hindu University in India, worked as a technical writer at Honeywell, and experienced a severe mental breakdown that led to psychiatric hospitalization and electroshock therapy – administered without his consent, a procedure that’s now illegal. He wrote the entire book between 2 AM and 6 AM in a small apartment above a Minneapolis shoe store while holding down his day job.
Then 121 publishers rejected it.
The editor who finally said yes – J.D. Landis – did so because “the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for.” He gave Pirsig a $3,000 advance and warned him not to expect much. The book went on to sell five million copies. George Steiner compared Pirsig to Dostoevsky. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights. The Smithsonian acquired the motorcycle.
One editor, after 121 rejections, said yes because the book forced him to confront what he actually cared about. That’s Pirsig’s thesis made real. Quality isn’t something you can define first and recognize second. You recognize it, and then, maybe, you can start to articulate why. Landis felt it before he could explain it. Every investor I know has had that experience. Every founder building something genuinely good has had the inverse – the thing they made was real, but the institutions couldn’t see it yet.
The concept at the center of the book is Quality – capitalized, because Pirsig treated it as something fundamental. Quality isn’t a subjective judgment or a metric you track on a dashboard. It’s something you recognize before you can define it – something that connects science, art, and spirituality in a way that most Western philosophy refuses to allow. Pirsig eventually connected it to the Greek areti – excellence, or virtue – but the power of the book is that he arrives at this through the act of motorcycle maintenance, not through academic argument.
I called it “a brilliant essay on quality” and I stand by that description seventeen years later. It was the first philosophy book I actually felt like I grokked (no, I am not going to let a company own that word, nor am I going to let a company own the word meta.)
Every entrepreneur I’ve worked with over the past 30 years has faced what Pirsig calls gumption traps. He defines them precisely:
“Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all.”
I’ve used that quote in Techstars CEO roundtables when founders are drowning in conflicting advice during week four of the program and have lost the ability to make any decision at all.
The antidote is also in the book. During a mountain road passage, Pirsig describes the narrator’s anxiety about hairpin turns at altitude – imagining a stone dropping thousands of feet. Then they ride the road.
“It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.”
I was listening to this on an audiobook during a pre-dawn training run in 2010, heading up Highway 36 toward Lyons in pitch blackness with 40 mph wind gusts, and I physically felt the smile break out on my face. The life lesson of that line is so powerful.
I’ve written before about wanting to see someone write the equivalent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for entrepreneurship – a philosophical treatise that will stand the test of time rather than another how-to book with a framework and a subtitle. Jerry Colonna and I have talked about the need for this over the years. It doesn’t exist, or at least I haven’t found it yet.
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