The other day I bought a road bike. The shop owner said a new bicycle needs to be ridden for a while — it has to be broken in slowly.

I don’t know whether the “breaking in” he meant was the rider adapting to the bike, or the bike adapting to the rider. Maybe both.

It reminded me of this passage from a book:

I have always spoken of everything mechanical in a highly rational way, because a machine is parts, is relations, is analysis, is combination, is understanding how things work. But it is never really here. It is always elsewhere, and we think that elsewhere is here, when in fact it is thousands of miles away. That is the nature of a machine. — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When a rider mounts an unfamiliar bike, the bicycle’s mechanical structure is also slowly adapting to the rider: the tightness of the bolts, the meshing of the gears, the lubrication of the pivots — all those countless “parameters” of the bicycle are reshaped together with the rider. The more you ride, the better the bike fits you. At the same time, the rider’s bones and muscles are slowly adapting to the bike.

That, I think, is what we call breaking in.

A few months ago DHH started a project where he hacked together an open-source tool that turns a Linux box into a keyboard-shortcut-heavy, productivity-maxed programming environment with a single command. Some programmers abroad criticized him, saying he was just packaging his own habits as an open-source project and making everyone learn them. But DHH calls this design philosophy “Omakase” (お任せ) — “I’ll leave it to you” — a Japanese restaurant tradition where the diner hands the choice entirely to the chef. I call it a chef-grade ready meal.

Starting from zero and tuning everything yourself is too high a barrier for most people. So perhaps following an expert’s lead and gradually breaking in something of your own is not such a bad path.

DHH is not only the author of the well-known open-source framework Ruby on Rails, he is also a writer and a race-car driver. Maybe, as someone with multiple identities, he has a desire to control his tools and environment — or, rather, a desire to coexist with them.

To coexist with something, it first has to be complex enough. It has to require you to understand it, to feel it. If something is simple, it has too few “parameters” to be fitted to you; you can only be stupidly fitted to it, adapting to it.

To bring something to the state you want, you have to go through a long journey called breaking in. Along the way, you see scenery different from what you expected, and the original goal becomes less important. Endless possibilities wait ahead.

That is the ideal state. Stop obsessing over perfection — perfection is a balance, and the journey itself is the destination.

Friends, train your endurance like a rider and keep breaking in everything around you, because breaking in is the whole meaning of life.