Authentic Efforts

Harry reads a passage from a book by Robert Pirsig that raises questions about what authentic effort looks like — and the traps inherent in its trappings.

• On Quality by Robert Pirsig
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
• Lila by Robert Pirsig
• Traction Heroes Ep. 11: Gall’s Law
• Atomic Habits by James Clear

Transcript

Harry: 0:00

One of my clients many years ago was starting a company and it was very important to them they got this beautiful office. And then, they had to get this custom made table. Then they had to get this perfect chair. And then they had to get this brilliant whiteboard. And then they had to get this fancy computer and this awesome screen. And it was like all of the energy that they were putting into the optics around the thing was not the thing itself.

Narrator: 0:34

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge: 0:45

Hey, Harry. It's good to see you.

Harry: 0:47

Hey, Jorge, it's great to see you as well. It's always a pleasure.

Jorge: 0:51

Our last conversation that we had, unfortunately had an audio snag. And I still got value out of talking to you, even though we won't be releasing that one. But here's a shot at another take.

Harry: 1:08

On some level, I'm a little bit pleased that one didn't manage to launch yet, because when we started our conversation last time, I realized that what I really wanted(was) the reading I'm gonna share today. And it felt out of order, in effect. So, hopefully I didn't rain karma on the call.

Jorge: 1:29

Feels like I need to knock on wood or something. But to your point, that in itself is a good takeaway here, which is the ability to look at the silver lining in things.

Harry: 1:43

Yeah.

Jorge: 1:45

Roll with the punches. And sometimes... well, not sometimes: mess ups will happen. And the question is, how do you respond to the situation?

Harry: 1:58

Yeah. And positive reappraisal is your friend.

Jorge: 2:02

That's a good way of putting it. We were talking before we started recording that you have picked a different reading. I'm very curious.

Harry: 2:11

Yeah. So this is interesting, I got an email from, I think you probably got the same email today from Dave Gray, it was perhaps a LinkedIn post on the creative process. And interestingly, that's what my reading is on. And I'm so excited to share this. I've been a big fan of this author for a long time. I'll wait till the end to share the author's name with you. And I'm very curious to see your reaction. It's a little bit long, but I think it's really well worth it. So, if I may, let me just dig in and then we'll go from there. Does that work?

Jorge: 2:48

Yeah, let's do it.

Harry: 2:49

All right, so..."I want to talk about the creative process. My medium is books, or to put it precisely, a book. Other people work in different media, but I think my creative process is not so different from the one that you may go through. And if so, then perhaps some things I say may have value for you. A lot won't. No two people are the same, in the same situation, or have the same set of problems, but in another sense, and this is a contradiction, everybody's in the same situation and has identical problems."Regarding the creative process, I wanna talk about two books. The first is the book I never wrote, and the second is the book I wrote. I'd like to contrast how both of these, the book and the non-book, were arrived at, and by comparing the two, try to get an idea of what was going on, and draw some morals and maybe find something useful in that process."The first book never did get a title, and of course, it never got written, but it was going to be a great book. My wife and I were just married. We lived in Reno, Nevada, and we were dealers in a gambling casino at the time. I dealt the Keno and this was the Nevada Club, and she dealt the roulette and we were gonna save money. We lived in a cheap trailer and we saved all the cash we could. We figured the only way to beat these casinos is to work for them and take as much as you can get and get out of there and never spend a cent if you can possibly avoid it, and then go someplace where costs are very, very cheap in this case, Mexico and then sit down there and write the perfect book.:So we worked for eight months. This was in 1953 or 54, and at the end we had$3,400 saved, which in the fifties was a huge sum of money, and we hitchhiked a Bobby and McGee fashion all the way through Nevada and into Southern California, across Arizona, and down into Mexico. And then, at the Mexican border, got a third class bus and went down through Mexico City through Veracruz way down into the jungles of Mexico and into a tiny little village in a town called Acayucan." I can't pronounce it. Oh my God, sorry for that."In Acayucan, we got paper and I bought a Parker 51 pen and prepared to write the great book."At first, I found a good room with proper temperature and proper exposure. It was nice temperatures down there. It was fall getting into winter. I got a comfortable chair and sat down. After about fifteen minutes, after all this preparation, I said,'Maybe I should walk a little.' I walked a little around town and met various people and talked for a while and said,'That's very interesting. Now I'll go back and write.'"And I went back and spent maybe an hour or two, and was really beginning to get frustrated and not willing to admit that maybe what I had come down all the way here for wasn't going to happen. So I procrastinated on this and other things for about a week, and at the end of the week, I still hadn't written anything. I began to become gradually aware that something was very deeply wrong. That everything I'd set up, everything I'd come down here for, wasn't right at all. It was the wrong situation. I was doing it badly."And then, at the time, an idea came along,"Well, I'll build a boat." And this struck me as one of the most brilliant ideas I ever had, of course, about that time because that got me out of writing. I tore into this little boat with great tenacity. I found that you could get a trained carpenter for$12 a week and you could get pure mahogany at twelve cents a board foot. We were very close to a river town, and I spent the next six months working on a boat. And that never got built either, although I still have some lumber in my garage and someday maybe I'll get back to it."So that was the first book. It's a process which I think is important to go through at one time or another. The great effort which produces nothing. The great stymie."

Jorge: 7:21

Wow, the great stymie. I love it. I was nodding in recognition internally here. I think we've all gone through this, right? When you first started reading it, I thought that it was going to be Rick Rubin, but then, when you set it in the fifties in a casino and then Mexico, I was like, no, it's impossible. What book is this and who is it by?

Harry: 7:50

This particular book is called On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence. It's the unpublished and selected writings of Robert Pirsig who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And it is a fabulous short and very interesting book on so much of what he covered in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and then followed up in his book Lila. But it's much more accessible in some ways. The philosophy, the metaphysics, the ideas that he had in this short little book, because they're letters that he's writing to explain things about his thoughts to other people rather than having to go through the fairly complicated narratives that he spun through Zen and the Art Motorcycle Maintenance and then where he delivered on the philosophy in more depth in Lila. But Like so many things in my life, this seems to be so deeply relevant right now, because this is all about doing it wrong and then finding your way to doing it right. And I just loved the process by which he attempted to set up the whole structure and basically realized that all of his effort in doing it right wasn't about building a practice to actually get something done.

Jorge: 9:28

I've read Zen and the Motorcycle Maintenance a couple of times. I read it in college first and then a few years ago, actually. But I haven't read Lila and I have not read On Quality. I can totally hear Pirsig's voice now, in that little fragment you just read. But the reason why I said that this was so recognizable is that I think we've all had projects that we started by trying to set the perfect conditions, where we come at it with the idea that we have the right idea, and that we just have to create the conditions necessary to get the idea out, when in reality, we don't have the right idea, we have the idea that we have the idea. And those are very different things. And it can be very frustrating to invest all this effort into building the right shop or, in this case, moving countries, just to be in the kind of perfect writer's shed, only to realize that you're now staring at this blank piece of paper and it's staring back at you and taunting you in a way that makes progress impossible. And this kind of avalanche of thoughts, where it leads me to is a subject that we talked about a few weeks ago, Gall's law, this notion that you can't build a complex system from scratch, you have to start small. And I think that is true also of creative efforts. You have to put the pen on the piece of paper and the pen needs to start moving and you need to let go of the idea that the first thing that comes out is gonna be the perfect thing. You just have to iterate your way to something that might be completely different from what you initially thought, but it's a thing, right? And it's the thing that scratches the itch that is causing you to put all this effort into the situation.

Harry: 11:42

Yeah, and it reminded me... one of the things this reminded me of, which was really powerful, wasn't so much a lesson, but it was an insight/observation. One of my clients many years ago was starting a company and it was very important to them they got this beautiful office. And then, they had to get this custom made table. Then they had to get this perfect chair. And then they had to get this brilliant whiteboard. And then they had to get this fancy computer and this awesome screen. And it was like all of the energy that they were putting into the optics around the thing was not the thing itself. And they would've been, I think, better off, better served, by thinking through what was it about what they were fixated on that was important and why were they trying to send this kind of message. Maybe that turns out it would've been valuable. For example, I have another client who has a fairly successful business and they've spent a lot of money on the optics of their business. But that's because, in that case, the second client hosts meetings at their office and they've managed to get business because people have stepped in their office and said,"Obviously your attention to detail is spot on and you clearly have the aesthetic that we're looking for and..." But, in contrast to that first business, where somebody thought they needed to do it right, they needed to have it all set up perfectly, and yet, they didn't spend the time to think through what really mattered underneath getting clear about was their idea big enough to be a product, was that product big enough to support a business? Was that business big enough to actually be sustainable? That wasn't where they were spending their time and energy. And all of us have fallen through this trap I know I have of,"I can't do the writing unless I have the perfect computer." Now, what's true is I realize that my writing process involves scissors and tape and pen and paper, it has nothing to do with how nice my Mac is. And I was just blown away by reading Pirsig's account of him trying to write the perfect book and just utterly flat based failing because that wasn't the book that was gonna get written and not in that particular way.

Jorge: 14:29

I have a friend who, when we were younger, he would do things like, he would say I'm gonna get into surfing, right? And then he would go off and buy a surfboard and he would go off and buy the right pair of trunks and he would buy the special kind of sunscreen to put on his face and all this stuff. And, he would show up at the beach with all the right gear, right? And we know people like that. It's like, I'm learning to do something, I'm a complete neophyte, but I'm gonna go off and I'm gonna buy the best camera, the best lenses, or what have you. And I think that it's easy to... I've always thought it was like, how silly, and in fact, one of my favorite rock bands is, Rush. They have this song called Limelight. And the chorus of the song, I think, is apropos conversation. It says, Living in the limelight, the universal dream, for those who wish to seem. Those who wish to be must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme. Which is to say, there are people who are all into,"I wanna seem like a rock star. I want to seem like a surfer. I want to..." And I used to have a very negative take on that if for no other reason that I could recognize the tendency in myself and despised it because it always ended up to me sinking a lot of money into something that went nowhere, and then I felt guilty about it. But now, I can kinda see the logic. And for me, the turning point came in reading the book, Atomic Habits.

Harry: 16:14

Oh yeah.

Jorge: 16:15

By James Clear. And this is an idea that I don't think is original to Clear, but it's the notion that if you really want to change your life so that you do the things that you want to be doing as opposed to the things that you say you want to be doing, one of the most powerful things that you can do is you can change your identity.

Harry: 16:36

Yeah.

Jorge: 16:37

You can change your identity so that all of a sudden, you start thinking of yourself as a writer, you start thinking of yourself as a surfer, or as a professional photographer. And the way that I see it now is that this tendency to want to set up the right conditions, get the right gear, do all this stuff, it's an attempt to cajole yourself into adopting that identity because of the sunk cost fallacy, right? It's like,"I've already put so much into this, I'm putting myself on the line to actually become the thing that I'm saying I'm going to become." It's a strategy for basically committing yourself, right?

Harry: 17:21

Yeah, I think that leaning into the identity thing is very powerful. And I agree, I think there's an enormous amount of energy or power to be gained from associating yourself into the kind of person who is that thing. I That's a very internal orientation and I think it's very different from thinking that the tools and the outside things are gonna bring the power to you. Funny, I'm talking on a brand new microphone today, given our little audio glitch. Here I am in Toronto and I realized I didn't have a travel microphone, so I made the effort to go to the local music store and pick up a Shure MV 88 plus so I would have a nice, melodious tone in speaking with you. And I found myself in kind of the guitar section looking around. I have had this hankering to play banjo recently. I don't know why. I've played guitar for many years. I'm not terribly good. But, I've been thinking about learning how to play banjo. But one thing I've learned about guitar and one thing I've learned about both playing guitar and learning guitar and having guitars and being around people that are learning guitar and being around people that have played guitar is, when you're learning a new instrument, you don't want to get a crappy one, because they're demotivating and they're harder to play. So you want to get one that's good enough that it's gonna pull you in to the thing rather than push you away from the thing. And so, I found myself, walking along the wall of banjos in the guitar store and not even knowing what questions to ask, but realizing that fundamentally, what I wanna do is I want to get an instrument that's good enough for a beginner and not so expensive that it will be prohibitive, but something that will pull me in. And, I think there's like a subtle difference, maybe not so subtle, between getting the right stuff, and then being a poser, or being a poser versus associating into the identity of being that thing. And yeah, the Pirsig writing really captivated me because there are other parts of that story in that book that talk about how Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came to be as a book that was failing for many years until he had a breakthrough. And that breakthrough wasn't about where he was sitting and whether he was building a boat or whether he had the nice office. It was about the material itself.

Jorge: 20:15

One of the themes in that book is authenticity, right? And it's the authenticity that comes from really knowing the workings of the thing that you are involved with at a very granular level. And to your point, if you go with the cheapest thing that will allow you to get started, your experience might be degraded to the point that you don't stick with it. What I thought of when you were saying that, It's funny you should use this example of the banjo, there's so many stories of like rock guitar players who started with a crappy guitar. Like, their parents bought them the cheapest guitar or whatever, and they just cranked through it and learned even though they had this crappy instrument or whatever. Which would be a kind of counter argument to that idea. But then I thought, Harry and I are in stages of our lives where we don't have the time that a younger person would have to fall crazy passionately into playing a crappy instrument to the point where you're willing to overlook its flaws. And if you have the cash to invest in something that is going to allow you to get started faster and more effectively, then by all means, do it. But don't do it just because you want to say that you have the fanciest, most capable, or what have you, when you haven't even taken the first photograph or played the first lick. It's counterproductive. And I would imagine that it's counterproductive psychologically as well, in that you're adding undue pressure somehow.

Harry: 21:54

I would say, for anybody that's ever either wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance, and for some reason hasn't, or for somebody that got partway through it and gave up because it was so difficult, or for somebody that read it but didn't really internalize so much of what Pirsig had to offer, partly because what he was promising he delivered in his follow-on book, I think this book, On Quality is probably the most accessible way to get into his head and understand what it means to be authentic and to what it means to experience a quality life. It's really short and it's really lucid in a way that I felt... zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of the first really complicated books I read, because I was dyslexic. So I didn't read a lot when I was younger, but when I got a hold of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I couldn't put it down. And then, when I read Lila years later, I realized,"Oh, so much of what he was talking about is now coming into shape in this follow-on book, which was nowhere near as good a story. But now this new work really puts a nice, bright light on the ideas, about what it means to experience dynamic life and how that fuels a creative experience and life.

Jorge: 23:44

Okay, so I'm adding both Lila and On Quality to my reading list. But, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. If you were given a billboard where you could, articulate like the big idea in On Quality, so as to draw someone into that book, what would you say it is?

Harry: 24:04

I would say that it is an exceptionally accessible look at the difference between living a dynamic creative life versus living a static experience in the rear view mirror.

Jorge: 24:26

It sounds like a perfect book for someone who is struggling to gain traction. So I think it fits perfectly with our theme. Thank you for that recommendation, Harry.

Harry: 24:36

Yeah. I really appreciate the conversation.

Narrator: 24:42

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.