Maintenance of Everything, part one - by Stewart Brand
ISBN: 9781953953490Date read: 2026-03-03
How strongly I recommend it: 3/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Because I loved his book “How Buildings Learn”, I expected a more philosophical look at maintenance, but it’s mostly a deep dive into a few specific examples of boats, guns, and cars.
my notes
“Maintenance” means the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.
Maintenance is what keeps everything going.
Every living thing spends time maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on: bodies, vehicles, homes, cities.
Everything is nested in something larger, even more worth maintaining.
The necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually.
When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.
My boat is (like) new every day.
A large part of maintenance is routine inspection.
Fix something when you first see it beginning to fail.
Prepare for the worst.
Read “Shop Class as Soulcraft” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
Work back from the visible part of the problem to the issues hidden behind it.
Ensure the problem goes away and stays away.
A noteworthy fix is a detective story.
Maintenance is frustrating. That’s what makes it interesting.
Inspect the aggravation itself.
When you’re baffled, your current theories aren’t working, so empty your mind of them.
Conquer the gumption trap of value rigidity.
(“an inability to revalue what one sees because of the commitment to previous values”)
If you can't think that way, just fake it.
Pretending to be open-minded can work well enough to reward you into gradually developing the real thing.
Allow what seems like an excess of time for your tasks, because things almost always take longer than expected.
Tidiness, like cleanliness, is a social signal - as much to yourself as to others.
It's visible evidence that something is respected.
Write down every step of the disassmbly process with reassembly in mind.
Understand how it works, and how it's made.
Anything he looked at, he’d mentally dismantle then reassemble before trusting it.
To take proper ownership of something, study its manual.
There are usually two manuals: the one from the manufacturer, and the 3rd party one that goes deeper and wider.
Swiss Environmental Action Foundation has a great book “Dry Stone Walls” that teaches the principles of the craft.
It applies metaphorically to anything that has to hold itself together: a poem, a theory, a software program.
Gravity plus friction.
Never paint rust.
The most active frontiers of maintenance are manufacturing, aerospace, software, and the military.
Design process:
1. Question every requirement.
2. Delete any part or process you can. If you don't have to add back 10% of them later, you didn't delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize, only after step 2.
4. Accelerate cycle time, only after step 2 and 3.
5. Automate only after all other steps.