1. Zen and the Art
of Startup Maintenance

2. How I Began
• Started in digital media
• Objectivity?
• Studied Linguistics, Semiotics
• An Experiment

3. Semiotics in One Word

4. Two Fundamental Truths
• No objectivity
• Humans are Irrational
• How does this apply to business or
life?

5. You Are What You Think
“If your mind is empty, it is always ready
for anything, it is open to everything. In
the beginner's mind there are many
possibilities, but in the expert's mind
there are few. ”
― Shunryu Suzuki

6. Living In The Present
• Can I change the past?
– (Spoiler alert: No)
• Should I worry about the future?
– (Define “worry”)
• How can I be mindful of the present?
• Directed versus peripheral vision

7. Living In The Present
• Time (through experience) shapes who we
are
• The stories we tell about ourselves
represent the past, which we think is fixed
and permanent but is also false
• We constantly curate a history for
ourselves that is very nice but is also
wildly subjective and not at all true

8. You Are What You Think
• The Universe is indifferent
• Most things are not good or bad, but
rather just are
• The foot feels the foot when it feels the
ground

9. The Tragedy of Belief
“In the sky, there is no distinction of east and
west; people create distinctions out of their
own minds and then believe them to be true.”
• Everything you know is a relative construct
• Believing that something is fated to happen
rejects all fundamental truth about the world

10. Relative Truth and The Work
• Living in the moment allows tasks of
great scope to become manageable
• Don’t see what has been done, only see
what has yet to be done
• “The jug fills drop by drop.”

11. Things Will Go Wrong
• The only mistakes you can make are:
– Not doing what you know best to do
– Not finishing what you start
– Not starting or acting

12. What is The Work?
• The Work is what you do
“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring
comes and the grass grows by itself.” -
Lao Tzu
• Comparison is the thief of joy (knowing
yourself vs. knowing others = Perfect
Confidence)
• Wisdom via fruit salad?

13. The Truth of Impermanence
• Nothing lasts
• Everything changes
• The truth of The Work is in doing The
Work, and nothing else

14. How to face adversity?
Make hard choices?
“If you understand, things are just as they
are;
if you do not understand, things are just as
they are.”

15. How to be what you want to be
when you grow up? What about the
future?
“The masters in the art of living make little
distinction between their work and their
play, their labor and their leisure, their
minds and their bodies, their education and
their recreation, their love and their religion.
They hardly know which is which. They
simply pursue their vision of excellence in
whatever they do, leaving others to decide
whether they are working or playing. To
them they are always doing both.”

16. What about my plans? Am I not
destined for greatness?
"Before Enlightenment: chop wood, carry
water.
After Enlightenment: chop wood, carry
water."

17. Gust Avrakotos and
the Tale of the Zen Master
“There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets
a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how
wonderful. The boy got a horse!" And the Zen master
says, "we'll see."
Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks
his leg, and everyone in the village says, "How
terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see."
Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have
to go off and fight... except the boy can't cause his
leg’s all messed up. And everybody in the village
says, "How wonderful.”