Ask Me Anything - spoonitnow

What did Pirsig teach you about Quality?

Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

What did Pirsig teach you about Quality?

Cliff Notes/Practical Answer: I was able to use his teachings as the basis for my understanding of performance psychology and for my understanding of how people relate to each other.

My first experiences that I could relate through his metaphysics of quality (MoQ) were from chess. Inside of a year of tournament play, I had maybe ten or twelve positions in the late middlegame where I ran into the same sort of situation. That situation is that I would have two different moves that worked towards my plan and improved my position, and they both seemed to be fine, but I would have a strong feeling of preference for one over the other. In my post-game analysis of almost all of the 10-12 positions, there was something I had missed in my initial calculations during the game that could have put me at a major disadvantage if I'd taken the option that I didn't feel the preference for.

It's probably important to note that I do not think in the terms that the MoQ framework uses, but I think it's extremely important to see how he really worked hard to flesh out a logical framework for these things. Along these lines, I've noticed that major portions of how I view learning are extremely similar to the pursuit of quality ala the MoQ. In fact, focusing in on quality and treating it as being isomorphic (for lack of a better term) to tao is probably extremely useful as a mental trick to give yourself something to "believe in" to get you through the difficult portions of learning something.

One of the most important lessons from his first book that I've been able to use to teach other people is as follows. If he's working on the motorcycle and strips the head off of a screw in the wrong place, then the value of that screw drastically changes. In fact, the value of handling the screw correctly can become almost the entire value of the motorcycle itself because failing to handle it correctly would render the motorcycle useless (and not worth much). The lesson here is that the values of things are constantly changing, and the only way to keep up with what the current values are is by staying present in the moment. For example, when you are assessing the value of something in the present based on its evaluation even just a few moments in the past, you open yourself up to major mistakes. To tie this into poker, tilt is a good example. A lot of people let something that's happened in the recent past affect their evaluation of the current situation in a not-so-good way, and this happens when they aren't maintaining presence.

Simply put, presence is the single most important thing that affects performance outside of skill level. The better your presence, the better your evaluations of the situations you're in for the present moment, and the closer you're able to perform to the best of your ability.

I realize this is probably a bit hard to follow for people who aren't familiar with his work at all, and I apologize for that. Consider the following:

Jared Tendler jumped into the scene a few years ago carving out a very specific niche of being a performance psychology coach for poker. In a framework that he has used before, he identifies four stages to learning something, and I'll summarize those stages:

1. You aren't aware that you aren't competent.
2. You are aware that you aren't competent.
3. You become competent on a conscious level.
4. You become competent on an unconscious level.

A good example for this is with a baby learning to walk. In stage 1, he doesn't know that he doesn't know how to walk. In stage 2, he realized that he can't walk or that he can't walk well. Stage 3 sees the baby able to walk, but only if he's focusing on every little movement, and everything is really slow and choppy. Finally you reach stage 4 where things have been learned on the unconscious level, and you're able to do it on "auto-pilot" without having to think about it because your brain is handling it on its own without needing your conscious input.

Once you reach stage 4, you start to be able to "feel" for how it works, and the task becomes a mental extension of your body in a lot of ways. There are different things that you can use to refer to this like intuition, feel, unconscious competency or whatever else, but whatever you call it, you know what I'm talking about.

Robert Greene called this level 'mastery' in his most recent book (titled Mastery), and it's a pretty decent read. Josh Waitzkin talks about how achieving mastery in multiple disciplines put him in a position where he was able to think in terms of one while doing the other, and vice versa. Carol Dweck described the mindset required to achieve this level of mastery in her book Mindset which I've referenced several times here on FTR, and she also did a lot of cool experiments on children that helped her to flesh things out. The book mentioned earlier in this thread The Brain That Changes Itself looks at the biological basis for the changes in the brain that happen to get it to this stage.

And Pirsig's idea of quality comes at the center of all of this if you believe mastery to be the pinnacle in pursuing quality, which I do. That's the impact his work had on my life. In short, it's the center of how I relate to pretty much everything.