Last week in class, we worked through an excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in an effort to more fully engage with the Quality part of the Quality Project. I readily admit that it's taken me several years of rereading those three pages to really start to internalize and practice living and working with Quality, being at the "leading edge of experience", the "zero moment of consciousness". What about you?
Spend a paragraph and comment on this post? What did you think about the excerpt? Did it make sense to you? What did you take away? How did you apply the ideas to your work on your own project? Or other parts of your life? Be specific.
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while reading this excerpt, it had a lot of terms and metaphors to it. and i dont honestly think that i fully understood everything that he was trying to say. the artwork in class was fun to say the least, but the visual representations also helped me a bit. when i looked at the pictures i had drawn, i realized that if one little thing goes wrong, everything you've done and everything you'd have hoped to have done has just gone down the drain; kaput... the train metaphor made sense to me, and i felt as if it was a great way to look at things. you have your project planned out, you know what you're gonna do, you know where you're going (or want to be going at least), but there are so many other variables to it. so like a train, you just have to take those variables as they come, because nobody can see the future. i guess a rather literal example of this would be a story that my asian history teacher told our class, "...the guide apologized for being late, but then proceeded to say that the man who jumped infront of the train, delaying everybody's schedules' inside the train, was very rude, and should've killed himself some other way." i feel this is a good example, because, who could've known the train would break down and be stuck because of one man. just that one man, among the many living in Japan, that one variable, stopped a whole entire train.
it made sense to me that sometimes you have to really think outside to box to put things together. I used this to help me come up with a survey and to see how this could help me and/or other people. If you are down and you don't know who to turn to, you can turn to music and with my survey and can help to find which music will help you feel better and get back to a joyous mood.
I would just like to say that this weekend I had to battle writer's block. If you've ever experienced writer's block, you know that it's the most awful thing in the world (if you're writing). It's just so bad. Luckily, I was able to get over it rather quickly. But that's been my experience with "stuckness" so far with the quality project.
I really enjoyed stuckness because i deffenently experience this with my quality project. I always find myself thinking outside of the box to fix situations like where to put in a movie clip that would flow with the music, and what do i want to film, and what places i want to film at.
I realized the kinds of connections I can make to my own project. The screw of my project has been, for pretty much my whole project, being processed--background checks, reference checks, fingerprinting; all of it takes time that I don't really have in the time frame of not just school but as an English project that has a due date. What I was able to take away from this passage is that I am so fixated on this timeline and waiting time that I'm completely closing off in my mind the numerous other things I could be doing for my project: interviews, further researching, etc.
One thing that I thought was interesting about the excerpt was when the author of the story jumps back and forth between the story and the meaning of what is happening. What I mostly got out of this reading is that there will always be a time where you get stuck in your projects and in life but what counts is how you find a way to get yourself out of it.
One thing I thought that was really interesting was when the guy striped the screw and it left him unable to open the door to fix the problem. This really screwed things up and he was truly stuck. This is an extreme case but it shows that everyone in some point in time will find themselves stuck not knowing what to do. You have to stay calm and brainstorm an ideas to get yourself unstuck. Thats is what I took from this reading. Just got to stay calm.
I thought that the excerpt was extremely beneficial to everybody's project because it clearly expressed the very essence of quality. At first I was confused but slowly understood what was being presented. I took away that even the smallest detail from anything can represent the utmost quality. With the torn slot screw quality fails to exist within the bike. I applied this concept to my project, paying attention to even the little things. For example my post on facebook, how it works, etc to keep supreme quality. I applied to somewhat to my life in the understanding of what he was trying to say in the essence of quality.
I thought that this was a very interesting reading. It consisted of metaphors that were very useful and well portrayed. A metaphor that really spoke to me was the metaphor of the train. It really applied to my project because even though I had previous experience and knowledge about filming, I still had to be the front of the train and experience new things and learn about the new techniques that confront me during the working process of the quality project.
I thought the excerpt was a good way to metaphorically look at Quality. The train metaphor was especially helpful. The leading box car is the car that leads the rest on the track of Quality. "It's the leading train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track." We are the only one who is able to lead ourselves on the right path of Quality. As the first box car leads the train, we lead our project.
I thought that this excerpt was very interesting but it was also very confusing. I thought it was kinda confusing because I didn't totally understand, but I got a general idea of what it was talking about. I didn't really take anything away because I figured out what I had to do before we read this excerpt. I haven't had to apply these ideas to my project yet but I'm sure at one point I am going to have to.
I thought that this reading was a good excerpt because it prepares us for what may happen on the journey of our project. It relates to me because I was kind of in a "stuck" situation and didn't really know what to do. My grandma went on a trip to Vegas and my project is based upon her. This reading kind of showed us an example of how to deal with a situation and how it was successful.
The Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance made me feel like it was easy to relate to. I feel like everyone was in stuckness of that degree at least once before. I know I have been stuck many times in the past and that getting over them in essential to learning and growing. The story made me realize that i was stuck on many things currently. I had a lot of project that were coming up that were getting in the way of what I wanted to do. For my quality project I had a hard time getting to practice the guitar. I was not always able to practice and it was frustrating. But now since I can actually take the guitar home I will be practicing a lot more.
The Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance made me feel like it was easy to relate to. I feel like everyone was in stuckness of that degree at least once before. I know I have been stuck many times in the past and that getting over them in essential to learning and growing. The story made me realize that i was stuck on many things currently. I had a lot of project that were coming up that were getting in the way of what I wanted to do. For my quality project I had a hard time getting to practice the guitar. I was not always able to practice and it was frustrating. But now since I can actually take the guitar home I will be practicing a lot more.
I think that I did understand it. It made me think about a lot of things, some examples were like i was thinking about how everything happens for a reason. So like why do people get stuck when on trips and projects? What would happen if we didnt get stuck? would it go smooth or worse? I think about that a lot. But then also when we were listening to this story I though about how small this island is and we could ride a motorcycle around the island like 2 times and then still would not be as long as the guy in the story was riding. but yes those kind of things make me thinks, its kinda fun tho.
I found this reading pretty helpful because it gives us a warning of what may occur among our journey of this project. It shows us a good way of dealing with a certain situation. Somethings are presents in disguise. Hopefully while working on this project, i would be able to avoid these "stuckness" situations, but you never know. I dodged one already and hopefully its the only one
To be honest I didn't really make sense of this excerpt. It seemed like he was talking about how the loss of one little screw made the bike completely useless and inoperable. I guess when I relate this to being stuck in the project, I think about being stuck when I'm writing. For example, when I have writers block and have no clue what to right about. I had this when I was writing my proposal and lit review for the quality project. But, when I found out about the Stand Up Journal, writing was so much easier. The magazine gave me lots of ideas about how to approach my project and what to write about. I guess I could say that the Stand Up Journal was the screw in my bike.
I thought that the excerpt explained how one thing can really ruin a plan or goal. The screw, in this case made it so he couldn't finish his overall goal. If the bike was kept in repair and made with better quality, them this problem wouldn't have happened. To prevent a "screw" from popping out in our quality projects, we must identify them and make sure our project is kept operating and rolling smoothly.
While reading this excerpt It really made me think about how to solve problems. You can't just do it the way it's always done or known to be you have to think differently. This happened to me during my project with many different parts of it. This is a good skill to have because in life your always going to go through bumps in the road and things aren't always going to go perfectly. you have to learn how to work around it.
Really impressive post . i enjoyed to read it..
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