A few days ago I hosted a workshop on unlocking your genius with linked book notetaking for The Second Brain Community.

If you didn’t get the chance to join, you can access the recording right here: https://fortelabs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e2240fc4-8297-4fe2-aad6-b1f8011c3168.

I sat there, palms sweating, trying not to slam my fists against the desk.

"This. Fucking. Camera." I whispered under my breath.

For the past three hours, I have been trying to hitch my Canon M5 on my computer. Once it was up, I could go from sitting to recording seamlessly for my YouTube videos. This would lower the activation energy for recording and allow me to explore my creativity more freely. At least, that was the idea.

The issue was everything that could have gone wrong. The camera stand I ordered didn't fit my thick Ben Q monitor. The dummy battery, which would charge the camera, just didn't work… The SD card I had was full.

After three hours of agonizing, I sat back, exasperated. Aidan Helfant, Cornell Psychology student, defeated by a camera... For the next few days, my flow was interrupted. Friends and family asked if anything was wrong. I didn't tell them.

It's this reaction to technology that made me feel a resonance deep in my chest when I first picked up Robert Pirsig's seminal book, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig wrote the book in the context of profound technological innovation, the 1970s, but it applies eerily to today. Mankind recently went into space, personal computers were coming out, and the internet was beginning to birth. At the same time, the world was becoming increasingly physically connected but psychically isolated.

He noticed many people reacted to technology in the same way I did. They know they depend wholeheartedly on it. But they don't understand it. This conflict can take all manner of forms from apathy to anxiety to annoyance like me.

For Pirsig, the conflict coalesced into him taking a road trip away from society. For two weeks, he motorbiked out west with his son Chris and friends John and Sylvia. The trip became one of the most important experiences in his life.

What made this road trip so powerful? On the outside Pirsig was simply riding out west. But on the inside, he was meditating on a profound question: how can we remain in touch with the energy of the Universe, our best selves, or what he calls Quality?

Quality can't be defined conceptually--a point Pirsig makes many times--but you feel it when it's there and when it's not. You feel its absence when you're walking outside, and the air seems stale after a nasty argument where you trod on your values, or as I did while setting up my Canon M5 on my computer.

Lots of things can break us from Quality, but it's especially common with technology. Technology is something we almost universally rely on and yet, it's alien to most of us. As a content creator, I rely particularly on technology. But do I actually know how a camera works, how a microphone captures sound? Absolutely not. This disconnect can make me feel powerless, without control, and lacking in quality.

This begs the question…

How Do We Stay In Tune With Quality?

When we are in tune with Quality we are what Pirsig calls, in gumption.

You know what this feels like. It's celebrating a birthday with one of your best friends, the laughter filling the atmosphere of the room as you sing happy birthday and your friend blows out the cake candles. It's engaging in a conversation with so much presence it satiates. It's working on a project with so much care you lose track of time and 30 minutes becomes three hours.

When in gumption, we can practice being our best selves, acting with wisdom, and in love with life in any action. This sounds wonderful! How can we be in gumption more often, especially while dealing with technology?

The trick is in making all of life our teacher.

Anything can become an opportunity to be in gumption if you open yourself up to it. Walking, cleaning a house, or as Pirsig points out, motorcycle maintenance—a profoundly technological activity. Quality is everywhere. You can see it in yourself; you can see it in mountain peaks and flower petals; and in "the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission" (Pirsig, p. 16).

It's easy to know this intellectually, and yet, like me with my camera we still fall out of gumption all of the time. There must be some "traps" which keep us from being in gumption all the time.

Pirsig explores 100s of "gumption traps" in his book, but by far the most pervasive and dangerous are value traps, in which our values conflict with the activity at hand.

Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values.

This can take so many forms: Egotism from valuing your conception of self too much, anxiety from overvaluing future worries, impatience from overvaluing speed, boredom from undervaluing beginners mind (coming to an activity with the mindset of a beginner), and so much more…

The analogy Pirsig uses to explain all of these value traps is the old South Indian Monkey trap. As Pirsig explains, "The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkey's hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped... It struggles to get its hand out, but with the rice, it doesn't fit. It's stuck, by nothing more than its value rigidity."

The solution is simple yet difficult, as many of the best solutions are. You have to slow down. Go over ground you have been before and try to see it with new eyes. Is there a different value you should be going at this activity with? Is there something obvious you aren't seeing because of rigidity?

If I had done this while handling my camera in the beginning anecdote, perhaps I wouldn't have reacted with such anger and frustration. I would have seen the practice as an opportunity to be in gumption, especially while handling something I don't have much control in. I was impatient, wanting the camera to be set up as fast as possible, not opening up to the setbacks that would inevitably come along the way.

In the future, I know technology will still make me crazy. Activities outside technology will make me crazy. But I'll be going into them knowing they can teach me, teach me how to stay in tune with Quality. Perhaps I'll never be 100% in touch with Quality. But 1% more sounds good enough to me.

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