I was thinking today as I went for the 6th time to Best Buy to get my piece of crap ipod fixed that we are all so disconnected and fragmented in modern life. I go into Best Buy to get my ipod fixed, and another company named Geek Squad handles it. And they send my ipod back to apple. Then someone at apple puts in a new hard drive. Then it gets shipped back to Geek Squad and then to me. I never see the person who’s fixing it. It breaks a week later. There’s no accountability and no connection. But who can blame the guy who sits in a factory all day putting hard drives in ipods? He’s not a robot. He needs a real human connection to the work he’s doing. And I want to just be able to talk to him. Like the days when you went into a TV repair shop and shook hands with the guy who would fix your TV.

That’s what hit me about the book Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was that many of us are so disconnected from what we do nowadays. Without any connection or passion for what we do, we just end up hating it and can’t even concentrate on it. We turn our minds off and do a bad job.