The Poems
Zen and the Art of [nothing] contains about twenty poems woven through its fifteen chapters. Each poem illustrates a concept — philosophy made physical, ideas compressed into verse.
Chapter 1 — What is Good
- Birth, School, Work, Death — the pointlessness of life in the machine
Chapter 2 — What We Are Supposed To Do
- If I Could Ask Any Question — the questions that matter
Chapter 3 — Existential Questions
- Practical Philosophical Truth — a haiku, a heritage, and the Boot Sequence
Chapter 4 — How Do We Know What We Know?
- Signal and Noise — signal, noise, and the things in between
Chapter 5 — These Thoughts in Your Head
- The Thinker & The Naught — consciousness and the contents of consciousness
Chapter 6 — A Map of Things Inside Your Head
- Subtle Choice — choice in the Garden of Eden
Chapter 7 — The Word is not The Thing
- Using Language Like Math — how language affects our perceptions
Chapter 8 — The Art of Complicated Subjects
- Evolution — how language and systems evolve
Chapter 9 — Meta-What?
- That Click — a gear freed, a window cracked, light streaming in
Chapter 10 — How Ideas Proliferate
- Not-a-Bible — what makes a book a bible
Chapter 11 — The Religion of Startups
- A Startup Religion — a thought that changed the world
- A Little System — the system to help you with your dream
Chapter 12 — A Big Vision Story
- Despair — the machine that pushes anxiety
- Today is the Best Day Ever — the Boot Sequence, in full
Chapter 13 — Philosofathergizing
- Song of Metaphysics — the song of stories creating reality
- Sunlight on my Eyelids — the story in your head
Chapter 14 — The Story of Weekly Accounting
- The Intention and the System — from intention to rowset to action
Chapter 15 — A System to Pursue Quality
- Not-a-Book — what you have in your hands
Appendix
- Tomorrow Let it Be — the best of me
All poems from Zen and the Art of [nothing] by John Zdanowski & Jeff Abrams.