The List I Never Showed Anyone
Fifty years ago this year, Robert Pirsig published a book about a motorcycle trip that was never really about the motorcycle. I was given a copy by my godfather, a man only four years my senior, at a strange double threshold in both our lives: he was getting married, and I was graduating from Boston University.
Two men standing at different doors, and he handed me a book instead of saying anything about what was on the other side of either one.
I did not understand what I'd been given. I read it the way a twenty-two-year-old reads most things handed to him by someone he admires, with attention to the surface and none to the depth. What I took from it was motorcycles. Not long after, I bought one. Then I went further and enrolled at Keith Code's Superbike School, learning countersteering and body position on the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, chasing the feeling of a machine responding precisely to input. It's a good feeling. It is also, I now understand, the most literal possible misreading of a book whose real subject was never the machine at all.
It took me until 2011 to read it correctly, and by then I wasn't reading the book again so much as living out its actual argument. I was traveling the Pacific Rim, and somewhere in that stretch of unfamiliar cities and long silences between them, I did something I had never done with any discipline before: I sat down and worked out, methodically, what I actually valued. Not what I said I valued. Not what would sound good in an interview or on a first date. What I would actually protect, in practice, when protecting it cost me something.
That trip marked the difference between living by accident and living on purpose. Before it, my choices were reactions, to opportunity, to attraction, to whatever was in front of me. After it, they were decisions, filtered through something I'd actually taken the time to define.
What came out of that process was a list. Five words, each with a great deal standing behind it: Health. Growth. Stability. Trustworthiness. Resilience.
That list is fifteen years old now, and it has done more work in my life than almost anything else I own. I've used it as a filter for every hard decision since, and there have been plenty, on both sides of the ledger.
The professional cost of getting the filter right
On the business side, the filter has cost me comfort more than once. I've walked away from roles, restructured relationships, and made large changes because an environment lacked trustworthiness or integrity at a level I could tolerate. This is not a small thing to say plainly, because the socially easier story is always the one where you stayed, adapted, made it work. I've been in rooms, commercial rooms, healthcare rooms, hospitality rooms, where the numbers were fine and the culture was rotten, and I've learned that "the numbers are fine" is not a value. It's a lagging indicator. Trustworthiness is the leading one, and when it's absent, derailment isn't really a risk. It's a timeline.
"The numbers are fine" is not a value. It's a lagging indicator.
Pirsig's narrator spends a good part of the book arguing with the ghost of a rigid, purely rational self he calls Phaedrus, trying to find where "Quality" actually lives, not in the object, not purely in the observer, but somewhere in the encounter between the two, held together by care. I think about environments the same way now. An organization's integrity isn't a fact you can audit from the outside. It's something you feel in the encounter, in whether the small commitments get kept, whether the language matches the behavior. When they don't match, no amount of technical or financial rationality patches it. You maintain what's in front of you honestly, or you're just riding along, waiting for the part that was never checked to fail.
The personal cost of getting the filter right
On the personal side, the filter has been just as demanding, and considerably harder to talk about in public. I have lived with one woman in my life. That relationship asked more growth of me than any job ever has, and the years since have asked a different, quieter kind of growth, the work of understanding what actually made that chemistry sustainable while it was, and what its limits turned out to be.
Here is the thing I don't hear enough people saying out loud: chemistry and compatibility are not the same instrument, and only one of them tells you anything reliable about the long run. Chemistry is fast. It's felt almost immediately, and it's persuasive precisely because it doesn't ask for your judgment, it bypasses it. Compatibility is slow. It's not a feeling; it's a fit between what two people actually value and how they actually behave under pressure, over time, especially when nobody's performing for anybody.
Chemistry is fast. Compatibility is slow. Sustainable chemistry is compatibility wearing a more exciting coat.
The values list changed how I evaluate that fit. I stopped asking people what they valued, people are extremely good at telling you what you want to hear, often without any intent to deceive, just because self-report is unreliable even when sincere. Instead I started doing something closer to fieldwork: watching behavior, watching character under small frictions, and quietly checking what I observed against my own list, which I never disclosed. Keeping it close to my chest wasn't secrecy for its own sake. It was method. The moment you tell someone what you're filtering for, you contaminate the sample. People, consciously or not, start performing to the filter instead of revealing themselves to it.
The moment you tell someone what you're filtering for, you contaminate the sample.
That is, I'd argue, a form of relational intelligence that doesn't get named often enough, maybe because it sounds unromantic to say plainly: sustainable chemistry is compatibility wearing a more exciting coat. The feeling is real. But the feeling alone has never once, in my experience or anyone else's I've watched closely, been sufficient to carry two people through the compromises that any real relationship, personal or professional, eventually demands.
Maintenance, not romance
This is where Pirsig's title stops being a joke about a hobby and starts being the whole point. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not about riding. It's about the unglamorous, continuous, unphotogenic work of keeping something running well, noticing the small misalignment before it becomes the large failure, caring about the parts nobody else is looking at. Values work the same way. A list you write once and never revisit is a decoration. A list you actually use, to walk away from a job, to understand why a relationship's chemistry did or didn't hold, to say no to something attractive because it fails the filter, is maintenance. It's not romantic. It's also the only version of the practice that actually works.
I've since built the discipline out further. What started as a private list of five words now has fifteen years of detail behind it, and it runs underneath the planning system I picked up from FranklinCovey more than two decades ago, the annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly review of goals, roles, and responsibilities. The values are the filter for what to protect. The planning cadence is the mechanism for actually protecting it, on a schedule, instead of only in the moment of crisis when it's hardest to think clearly.
Fifty years after Pirsig's book, and fifteen after I finally understood what my godfather had actually handed me, I think the throughline is this: nothing that matters, a motorcycle, a set of values, a relationship, a career, runs well because you got lucky with the initial fit. It runs well because someone keeps choosing it, on purpose, on a schedule, whether or not it feels urgent that day. Values-driven living isn't a mood or a personality trait. It's just a long series of intentional choices, repeated past the point where anyone's watching. That's the whole art. It was never about the wrench.
