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I can be whatever
The system needs me to be…
…ultimately nothing.
I am a story.
You’re never going
to make any real money
just work’n for someone else.
I am the father of my sons
I am the one who comes before
I am the son of many men
Who struggled in life and war.
Today is the best day ever.
I am free to do whatever I want
I am the master of my universe and
I am the narrator of my own epic story.
What you have in your hands is Not-a-Book.
It's Not-a-Book you have to read.
Most of it is blank - you see?
A coaster you may never need.
Put it down for weeks and months, it's fine.
Mine sat blank for about a year,
hiding away from all my fear,
until an insight just appeared.
The stories we tell, they make us us
they’re ours to write and this is thus,
a space to fill, a space to chill,
a space for when you have the will.
So buckle up, release your fear,
it’s just a place to rest your beer.
The intention of Not-a-Book, you see,
Is to consider how our lives could be
If we had a new story.
We started writing months ago and
Filled a notebook on the go.
Its pages full, so that one’s done.
Consider this another one.
There’s room for you to write Your Art
We’ve left some room for you to start.
Zen and the Art of [nothing] is an infinite series of Not-a-Books. This is Part 0:
0. Zen and the Art of Nothing: An Inquiry into Stories
The Inspiration for the series was two books by Robert Pirsig, we call them Parts 1 and 2.
1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig 1973
2. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig 1991
Part 3 and 4 are being developed.
3. Zen and the Art of Weekly Accounting: An Inquiry into Systems
4. Evo: An Exploration of Poetry
[ ]. What number will your Not-a-Book be?
Part Zero is an Inquiry into Stories. It has three sections:
Section 1: The Practical - Welcome to the Real World. Growing up I did what I Should do. I was rewarded with a job I hated and a future that wasn’t for me. This section is an overview of the philosophy I was indoctrinated into and the decades it took me to break free.
Section 2: The Philosophical - The Stories We Are Told. Once freed from the system, I had time to explore. How do we know what we know? What are the stories we’ve been told? What are the systems that have been used to deliver these stories to us? How do these stories proliferate and reach us?
Section 3: The Truth - The Stories We Tell. The truth is that we can intentionally install a new story about ourselves and our place in the world. In this section we introduce The Boot Sequence as a method to begin to write your own epic story.
The Not-a-Book: The rest of the not-a–book is blank. It's a space for you to begin to write your own epic story.
The chapters are short and begin with a poem. The first chapter is about my first job out of college and the seeming purposeless grind of the daily routine.
Input process output
Food; the use and waste
Feeds another system
That must consume in haste.
Delays just make us hungry
And burn what was desire
To try to make a difference
Or just toss it in the fire.
Input process output
Your brain, your time, your job
Feeding you some money
Your life, it seems, they rob.
In truth you are the giver
Of time to the machine
Retirement the vision
Of some future life serene.
I hated my first job out of college. I was an electrical engineer working in a windowless lab in the most sunless city in America. Even when there was sun, we had no window to see it.
I landed in a cubicle in a windowless office because I was supposed to land there.
It felt pre-determined. My brother landed there seven years before me and he was still there.
The philosophy that had been handed down to both of us was simple and this job was the stated definition of success.
To get a Good Life I was told to:
From that cubicle farm in a windowless office, I began to question everything I was taught from Catholicism to the idea of retirement as a worthy goal.
I read lots of books. Self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Think and Grow Rich; simpler philosophy books like Aristotle For Everybody and Sophie’s World, career books like What Color Is Your Parachute and So You Want To Be a Lawyer; and dystopian science fiction like Brave New World and 1984.
Two books by Robert Pirsig stood out for me in 1991: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - An Inquiry into Values, and Lila - An Inquiry Into Morals. Together they were about the Metaphysics of Quality. In his metaphysics Pirsig questioned one of the core foundational concepts that Western Civilization is based on.
When I re-read them recently, they became the seed crystal that reorganized everything I’d written and thought about before that.
I wonder, I wonder,
what you would do,
if you had the power to
dream any dream you wanted to. –Alan Watts
Along the way to dreaming any dream you wanted to, you’re going to have to live somewhere and eat food. Today that means we have to turn time into money. Thee is a progression that we live through on this path from the worst ways to make money to the best.
For this list, we’ll start from the #10, the worst way to turn time into money and progress over the course of a career to #1.
10. I am a sheet metal worker paid on a union scale.
My dad was a sheet metal worker, a job more difficult and dangerous than any I would ever have. His hands, callused from so many cuts, felt like a gorilla’s. At 85, bent from arthritis, they have softened. We stand on the shoulders of those that came before us.
#9. I am a newspaper carrier paid per paper delivered plus tips.
When I was twelve, like my father and brothers before me, I got a paper route. This is a job they won’t even let kids do anymore. Don’t be afraid of grunt work.
#8 I am an entrepreneur who failed.
I used the money I saved from my paper route to buy an Apple ][+ computer in 1980. I taught myself to code and wrote a program to solve the Rubik’s Cube. At the time word processors were very new and they didn’t have spell checking systems. I typed in a dictionary and developed a spell-checking system. I paid $100 to advertise my spell checker in a magazine that went bankrupt before the ad got published. My first failed business at age 13. It would be a while before I tried again. When you try something new, expect to fail five times.
#7 I am a restaurant worker, paid minimum wage.
When I was sixteen, like my father and brothers before me, I got a second job. I washed dishes, prepped food, cleaned pots, and emptied trucks for $4.25 an hour at Red Lobster. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
When I noticed how the managers were counting inventory and calculating the replenishment orders, I suggested I could write a program to do that automatically. I got paid twice my hourly rate for a few weekends. When in doubt, add value.
#6 I am a summer intern at an auto parts factory in the union.
One summer, during college, I assembled windshield wiper parts from 4pm to midnight on an assembly line. Several years later they packed up all the machines at that factory and shipped them to Mexico. When things end, sometimes it’s a failure of imagination.
#5 I am an engineer in a windowless lab, testing software for weapon systems on a salary.
I graduated college in three years and was rewarded with my least favorite job, as I mentioned earlier. During the three years I was there I also earned a Master’s Degree. I scrambled to find my way out. Business school would provide that parachute. If you’re not happy, get happy.
Looking back on it years later, I realized everything I wrote about in my application essay to Harvard Business School happened in order. The only aspiration that hadn’t happened yet was that I would write a book. So I started writing. What we speak is what we see, it must be true, it’s poetry.
#4. I am in a professional services firm making a salary plus a bonus.
After Harvard I worked in consulting and investment banking. I consulted with companies like Xerox, Nextel, IBM and Hasbro and as a banker helped people sell their businesses. After a few months as a banker it seemed I’d learned everything there was to learn. That’s never a good place for me to be. Time to reinvent myself. You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.
#3. I am an employee who gets a salary plus stock options.
I met my wife at Harvard and we chased the sun to Manhattan Beach, California. For twenty years, I practiced starting, running, selling, selling and buying companies. We moved up and down the west coast as if we were in some kind of startup witness protection program. To live and to love you have to take risks.
#2. I consult and get paid for my expertise.
By this point, I’d taken four companies from single digits to ~$100m in revenue. It seemed unlikely I would go five for five if I jumped directly into the next job that came up, so I started to play the game a little differently. Keep planting seeds.
This is when my nephew Jeff joins the story. We built a portfolio of companies that we were helping with data warehouses and financial models and strategic advice as fractional CFOs. Try things, repeat what works. You’re going to get better at it.
#1 We built a system that we tend to like a garden, and it pays us.
When I turned 50, I started thinking about playing the game differently. Jeff could see the new game long before I could. Once we could see it, we couldn’t unsee it. Why hadn’t we started it before? Insight never appears before it does.
This is how its been
It sounds completely silly
But, I’m consciously transmitting
Myself through fam-ily.
I’m consciously transmitting
A story to my kin
My nephews seem to hear me
More than my child-ren
It wasn’t my objective
But that’s just how it’s been
The kids they cannot hear me yet
The world still has them in
Geography is destiny
But other limits, sin.
Jeff and I started BrightZen Systems as a partnership to level each other up and document the process for others to follow.
BrightZen Systems spun off its first revenue stream into the company Weekly Accounting. Weekly Accounting is a system to help people see their business better. At first it grew through referrals to us and we had to do all the work. Now it’s a system that we tend to and it pays us - the #1 way to turn time into money.
With that system built, we turned to understanding the stories we’ve been told and re-writing the stories we tell.
In "Section 2: The Philosophical: The stories we are told" we question the stories we’ve been told and the path laid out for us.
The first poem explores the relationship between words, perception, and the reality we inhabit.
At first this won’t be easy
But very soon you‘ll see
We’re confused by a description
Of reality
The map is not the territory
The word is not the thing
The financials aren’t the business
A new song now to sing.
A song of metaphysics
Subject-object not
Quality and stories
Reality upsot
Stories create reality
And that’s how we arrange it
We’re surrounded by a many dream
And we can learn to change it
You might say that it’s impossible
But it’s our thing to dream it
We’ve always dreamed a many dream
And then we have achieved it
Now that you have heard it
It won’t be hard to see
When we tell a story
We create reality.
From the day we are born we begin to hear stories. Children’s stories, family stories, history stories and war stories. It's through these stories, we learn and shape ourselves and the world.
One class of stories seemed to be more written in stone than others: stories in bibles. In order of their appearance they include:
The Vedas, The Torah, The Upanishads, The Talmud, The Bible, The Dhammapada, The Quran, The Tao Te Ching, The Bhagavad Gita, and of course The Book of Mormon written a few miles from where I was born in Rochester New York.
All books, and certainly bibles are systems to capture a story or a philosophy and pass it through generations. There’s a tension between the static nature of books and bibles and the dynamic nature of the world. I wondered “What makes a book a bible?”
What makes a book a “bible”
The ones that mustn’t budge?
It’s only their longevity
Letting everybody fudge.
Some words are weak, stories confused
Some are just plain weird
Its strength was never clarity
Just old men, most with beard.
It must not change, it is the truth,
Just how…you’re left to judge.
Just not for all humanity
See, only for yourself.
But that’s not how these books were used
The truth was hard to see
These stories were used by men
For wealth and polity
But if a “bible” could evolve
I wonder what it’d say
The choices of what’s written
Still left to men this way.
It would be weird with many truths
Arguing this or thats
But that’s exactly what we have
As a matter of the facts.
We all carry a bible
Our mind, Our map Our judge
It's there, at least, subconsciously
Our own stories to fudge.
Make any book your bible
Write what you think is true
Write exactly opposite
Then notice, please God, the hue.
Books, bibles, stories, laws, governments, companies, families carry the essence of a culture, a way of life, or a worldview, bridging generations and geographies with their branded system of values. They act as blueprints, offering guidance on understanding the world, deciphering right from wrong, and providing a sense of purpose and direction.
Families pick from these branded systems of values and consciously or thoughtlessly pass them onto their children.
In the past, questioning bibles was blasphemy punishable by death. In some corners of the world that is sadly still the case.
Still, we ask questions. The next poem is all questions.
If I could ask any question,
where would I start?
Would I ask about music?
Would I ask about art?
Would I ask about conquest
and power and pain?
Or ask about truth
and justice or rain?
Would I ask about God
or ask about men?
Commandments or laws
and what about Zen?
Would I ask what to value?
Would I ask what to do?
Why am I here?
And what about you?
What thing, if you knew it,
Would make your life better?
Ask it and ask it, but
Don’t wait for a letter.
All human knowledge
Of what seems to be known
Right there at our fingertips
Right there on our phone.
Ask it your question;
its answers are free.
Not Twitter, you idiot,
It’s ChatGPT.
But even if you could ask any question, a lot of what is on the Internet in general, and Twitter (Now ‘X’) in particular, is wrong, has an agenda or wants to sell you something.
So the question becomes, how do you sort through it?
In that first job out of college, in that windowless lab in the most sunless city in America, I worked on radar and sonar systems. These systems would gather information about the world, clean it, sort it and re-convey it as a map of the territory.
The systems we built sampled the information and sorted through the signals and the noise.
We all receive signals from the world. We process what we hear and we incorporate it into our lives almost without thought.
As I was walking around a Buddhist Monastery in Chithurst, England, I thought about Signals and Noise in the stories we are told.
What is the signal and what is the noise?
What is reality? What is the ploy?
What is the sickness and what is the well?
What part is heaven and what part is hell?
What can you know before being taught?
What can you see before there is thought?
Is there a path? Is there a way?
To shuffle the clutter from here to away?
What is the seed and what is the flower?
How would it be different if you had the power?
What is the root and what is the tree?
Can we be separate or one you and me?
What is the tree and what is the leaf?
What do you point to as your source of belief?
What is so pure and what is diluted?
Who has the truth and who is deluded?
What is religion and what is the way?
Why should we listen to what you have to say?
What is the food and what is the waste?
How would we be here if we had to be chaste?
Why is there earth and why is their air?
Everything wiped out with one solar flare?
Before you were born long after you’re dead,
What will they mean, these thoughts in your head?
Thoughts clutter our minds like junk clutters the Internet. Where do thoughts come from? As we were exploring our philosophy and developing our business, my nephews Jeff Abrams and Phil Zdanowski visited San Diego.
Over tea one afternoon, I leaned over to Phil and said:
“I used to think my thoughts were true.”
He replied
“You have to…don’t you? What are your thoughts to you?”
I laughed at the perfect rhyme and meter that Phil had blurted out. The poem continued.
I used to think my thoughts were true.
You have to…don’t you?
What are your thoughts to you?
You have to believe
Your thoughts are true
Without your thoughts
Who are you?
I used to think my thoughts were me.
If they aren’t you…
Then who are thee?
I am the thinker, let me be!
I control that string of thought
I am the Thinker, am I not?
Just sit and think a string of thought
Are you the thinker or the naught?
I used to think that I decided
Which thoughts got through and which got sided
But that was just another thought
That bubbled up above the naught.
Who controls what bubbles up above the naught? In the movie “The Matrix,” people are hooked up to the machine which projects the world into their minds. Our experience in the world is strangely similar. Our entire lives are an appearance in consciousness.
Consciousness is vast and unchanging - the “naught.” Everything we experience is the Contents of Consciousness.
Whether the inputs are coming from the overlords in The Matrix, the indoctrination we receive through education, or from our activity in this world.
Despite 12 years of religious education and indoctrination as a child, I didn’t learn to meditate until I turned 50. In guided meditations, we are asked to notice various phenomena that arise in consciousness and then fall away.
By observing various methods that meditation teachers use, the contents of consciousness can be displayed in this 2 x 2.
Everything that passes through consciousness is represented by the four words on this two by two - Breath, Breeze, Thought, Stories.
Consider how Breath and Thought are similar–I can make myself breathe rapidly or slowly; at the same time, I can just ignore it and breathing still happens. Thought is the same way. I can focus my attention on a subject and write this sentence, but thoughts form without my attention anyway.
Bringing it outside the body, Breeze represents all the wordless things in my environment that I feel and affect me. I have no control over them.
Stories work the same way. Stories happen even as I take my awareness away from them.
The line down the middle of the two by two is an important one. It's the line between life on the planet before words on the left and after words on the right. It's such an important line that it's one of the most famous lines in The Bible.
Why?
It's easy to forget the awesome power of The Word that each of us thoughtlessly wields. Nature’s ability to transmit information through generations was severely limited before words. When we acquired the ability to use words everything changed - a new beginning for the planet, humanity.
It's like we ate from some sort of tree of knowledge.
Assume Garden of Eden
How would you behave?
Would you be the foolish one?
Or would you be the knave
Would you fight for all our innocence
Or fight for knowledge true
To speak the word like gods
Or bathe in morning dew
Who will decide for all?
The One! Yes! The Decider
Would she say what’s right and wrong?
And who would sit beside her?
I’d rather let each one decide
A much more subtle choice
To succumb to death and homicide
Or learn to use your voice.
It seems once we learned to use words, we learned to argue. People argue about everything. I think people argue because they say things in an arguable way. People forget that the words they use are just pointers to what they represent.
In Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig pointed to Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics. I read and reread Korzybski’s 1937 General Semantics Seminar Series transcribed from his lectures at Olivet College. As I read it, I felt myself in the audience hearing his words as if I were there.
I drafted a few bullet points about what I learned from the lectures. It turned into this Not-a-Poem.
Everything is either
That or Not That.
Things that are Kind of Like That
are Not That.
Anything that can be
Pointed at or thought of is
Either That or Not That.
See for yourself! It’s a test of sorts.
An inarguable truth.
Sometimes you can find
Things That Break The Rule.
Even a Rule as Simple As That.
You might find, for example,
A mammal that lays eggs.
Mammals don't lay eggs -
That’s the definition of a mammal. And yet,
A mammal that lays eggs -
Is called a Platypus.
If you find too many Platypuses,
In Your Math or in Your Language,
Then it's Time To Question
Your First Principles,
Your Generalizations,
The Implicit Assumptions
Embedded in your language.
Inevitably, when you face a situation frankly,
A solution appears.
This has been true for the
Whole history of civilization.
Insight never appears before it does.
We are surrounded by the insights of generations of people before us. A lot of philosophical thought that western civilization is based on came from the time of Ancient Greek philosophers Plato, Aristotle and Socrates.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig questioned Aristotle’s “subject - object metaphysics” and drove himself crazy. In his second book, Lila, he further elaborated on the Metaphysics of Quality.
Metaphysics is a big word, it’s just a lens to see the world through. A framework, a mental model. Long before the written word, complex subjects were communicated in verse.
Born in garden sunlight
In harmony with spring
Living off the landscape
Like every living thing
Rivers smooth the mountains
Animals trim the trees
People help each other
In the evening breeze
Lessons passed through generations
Sharing information slow
Communication speeds up
Ending status quo
Stories group the people
Ideas swarm like bees
People fight each other
For imaginary needs
There is no way to stop it
The Word exacts its price
Defining Us distinct from Them
Was our only vice.
The Metaphysics of Quality is a complicated subject.
Normally, when big words and complicated subjects come up, you can almost hear people’s brains click off. It's not surprising, and there are good reasons it happens.
Complicated subjects have been institutionalized in the Church of Reason. Priesthoods have formed around beliefs etched in stone generations before people knew the world was round. Education systems are rotely pass on the stories accepted by the incumbent cultural system.
Viewed through that lens, history is simple: Different cultural systems bubble up and disappear. A few persist. People struggle for resources within their cultural systems and people struggle in the clash of cultural systems.
New technologies and new ideas change cultures. Better systems inevitably proliferate or reach a tenuous balance of cultural market share.
Status quo is an illusion. Everything changes. A dance between control and chaos. Between people in various governance systems and people unhappy with the way things are. It usually takes a Brujo - a crazy person to change things. Sometimes it’s just a crazy person's idea. Consider an idea as simple as wearing helmets when we ski.
When I first learned to ski, nobody wore a helmet. If you saw a person wearing a helmet you might think they had a cracked skull.
Today everyone wears a helmet. If you see someone not wearing a helmet you might think they need their head examined.
If you plotted the percentage of people not wearing a helmet over time from then until now it would look like this.
Initially, nearly 100% of skiers didn’t wear helmets. Now nearly 100% of skiers do wear helmets.
The curve from 100% to 0% (or vice-versa) is called a Logistic Function. Underlying the logistic function is a normal distribution. In a normal distribution of skiers, some were early helmet adopters and some were late adopters.
Such change across populations is common. There are early adopters and late adopters of every new idea and new technology.
We see it in the decades of transition from landlines to cell phones.
And in the eon’s long transition from early humans to Homo Sapiens.
It is similar in the adoption of electricity, housing, and sanitation systems.
There was a time before everything in your life.
Sometimes stories seem to be instigated by a single founder. As it seems with religions. Before Jesus Christ there was no Christianity.
This transition from one system to another happens similarly for cultures, companies and people. It's easier for a single person to change themselves than it is for a single person to change a culture or a company - but the process is the same. It starts with an Intention.
Our lives are a reflection of the story we’ve been telling ourselves. Everything we’ve ever accomplished - graduating high school, college, buying a car - started with a story in our heads. This insight establishes a limitless core truth about our reality.
It starts with an intention,
And turns into The Word,
Sample progress in a row set
Precise, like hummingbird.
Compare the row set to intention
An accounting every week
Make predictions of the future
The system then will seek.
If still not good then you will know
Exactly what to do
Mind or system has to change
The fix is up to you.
Writing about motorcycles, Robert Pirsig wrote “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
Like a motorcycle, life is a system that must be tuned and re-tuned.
Today your life is 100% the way it is. Everything you’ve ever accomplished started as an intention. Going to college, buying a car, buying a house, finding a mate all started with an intention - yours or your parents.
It is empowering to realize that we can rewrite the story of our lives. The intention of Zen and the Art of [nothing] is to inspire, encourage and empower you to write your own epic story.
Jeff said, How do you want your day to be?
I said, All The Work would be done for me!
Yada Yada, “The Work” did we.
It wasn’t long, we’re in year three.
Now our days and nights are free
What you speak is what you see
It must be true…it’s poetry.
A Boot Sequence is the process an electronic system uses when it wakes up to tell itself who it is. When you turn your phone or your TV or your computer the logo it flashes is part of the boot sequence.
Do you have a “Boot Sequence” that tells you who you are?
In a sense, we all do whether we realize it or not.
On the path to A Good Life, one of the things I did to get into a Good College was become a Boy Scout and earn the rank of Eagle. Among the requirements to be a member was to memorize and regularly repeat the Scout Oath and Scout Law. It's like a boot sequence for a boy scout.
Every day at school we’d recite the Pledge of Allegiance - a boot sequence for school children in the United States.
Ritual and repetition bind people together.
Most of these memes people memorized include a statement of values for the community to believe including:
Our lives are a reflection of the story we’ve been telling ourselves. Everything we’ve ever accomplished - graduating high school, college, buying a car - started with a story in our heads.
It is empowering to realize that we can begin to install new assumptions about the world in our own heads intentionally. These repeated intentions go deep into our subconscious mind and affect how we see the things that are happening around us.
Here’s the preamble to the boot sequence as it was passed on to me:
Today is the best day ever
I am free to do whatever I want
I am the master of my universe, and
I am the narrator of my own epic story.
[ Insert your own epic story.]
Do:
Start where you are
Say exactly what is
Imagine the opposite
It's somewhere in between
Have an aim. Elevate your aim.
Recover quickly. Iterate.
You’re going to get better at it.
Remember it's a practice.
Don’t
Imagine it will always be this way.
Believe your own bullshit.
Forget the universe is an intention reciprocation machine.
Give up.
Fear reducers
Start with the appendix
It’s just a memo to self
You’re going to get better at it
Prompts
Notice the path you walk each day
Where do you spend your attention?
How would you spend your attention?
What are you curious about?
Methods
Write what you know, then write questions.
Draw pictures.
Make lists: people, qualities of something.
Write the qualities of something then write exactly the opposite quality
Random flashes of brilliance - the “high notes”
Long before you slept at night
Before you learned a thing
You learned to count from one to eight
And then you learned to sing
You heard reverberations
of every tale that’s told
You might as well decide to write
one of your very own
We’re the stories we tell
We’re the stories we tell
We’re the stories we tell
Ethos refers to the characteristic spirit, values, beliefs, and guiding principles of a particular individual, group, culture, or community.
We developed Our Ethos when we started BrightZen Systems.
During Covid, I became a gardener and a writer. Among the thousands of seeds I planted, the Gardening Tips appeared.
I was sitting under a giant ficus tree in my backyard thinking about the Garden of Eden. I don’t think we ever left the Garden of Eden. If it isn’t here, where else could it be?
In gardening as in life it seems.
Perhaps I haven’t finished
Cleaning up my room
A weave that I’ve left sitting
Half done upon the loom.
Today I am publishing
The best of me right now
The best that I can share
From tree to limb to bough.
Perhaps this is all there is
The best my room will be
There’s still some empty pages
The rest we’ll have to see.
