Last month I was listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast. His guest was Stewart Brand — one of Silicon Valley’s foremost philosophers, there to promote a new book I haven’t read yet but almost certainly will. Brand said something that formalised, in a single clean idea, a belief I’ve held about myself for years. One I’ve told friends and my wife about, but never properly written down.
I am a maintainer.
I’m also a pretty decent builder — I’d go as far as saying a good one. But building is the part that gets me going. Maintaining is the part that keeps me going. And the longer I do this, the more I think maintenance is the underrated half of almost everything.
A folder for each car
I’m a car person. I enjoy getting a new car as much as anyone else does.
But do you know what I enjoy more?
Setting up the folder.
Every car I own gets a dedicated folder, 2 actually, one physical, one digital — papers scanned and backed up to Dropbox, and an Asana project with self-replicating tasks for servicing and maintenance, an Excel sheet logging every expense and every service mileage, and a small printed sticker on the dashboard showing what mileage the next service is due. My trusty handheld label printer does that last part.
If you don’t have a handheld printer with which to make labels for your double-pole switches and so on at home, are you even alive?
A friend of mine was genuinely amazed when I told him I have a recurring task in Asana to clean the air conditioning filters every four to six weeks. His reaction was something like: why would you do that?
My reaction was: how does it get done otherwise?
Same for the water softener. Same for the house. If I don’t schedule it, it doesn’t happen. And if it doesn’t happen, things quietly degrade until they fail at the worst possible moment, and then the repair costs three times what the maintenance would have.
How this translates professionally
It means I’m the kind of person who, when we build something for a client — a brand identity started from the very first colour palette sketch, a website now on its third iteration — I’m genuinely ready, willing, and able to maintain it properly.
Not just because maintenance generates retainer billing, though it does.
But because I genuinely believe that if something works, if it isn’t broken, it shouldn’t be replaced.
Replacements come with complications. A proper maintenance schedule is the right, correct, and — I’d argue — morally sound approach to anything that has a footprint in the world and an effect on the people who use it.
That includes digital products.
Yes, they’re intangible. But they’re not inconsequential.
A website that nobody’s touched in four years isn’t just aesthetically stale — it’s sending a signal to everyone who lands on it. And that signal is not a flattering one. That signal says, “Nobody’s home, and nobody’s watered the plants here. Behind this door lies death and decay.”
The philosophy behind it
Perhaps I am overly dramatising this, but, there’s a wider idea here that I find genuinely compelling.
I’m a fan of the Japanese concept of mastery through sustained practice — the idea that doing one or a few things across a lifetime of toil elevates both the practitioner and the practice itself. It seems to me to run counter to a very Western tendency to treat maintenance as something cheap, something to be rushed, something to be avoided altogether if replacement is an option.
In the Hindu tradition, Vishnu is the Maintainer. His job as the preserver is to keep systems in check, in balance, well-oiled and working, “providing the stability, balance, and nourishment required for life”.
His counterpart Shiva — the Destroyer — has the more glamorous role, throwing all the toys out of the pram and making sure they’re broken.
Shiva gets the headlines, but Vishnu keeps everything running.
I know which one I’d rather be.
In training, but not always progressing
It’s the same with your body. There are periods in physical training — and in martial arts especially, the world I come from — where you’re not adding to your personal best, not learning new techniques, not moving up the ranks.
That doesn’t mean that you stop.
You keep training to maintain what you’ve built. To hold your position. Because you’re not always going to be rising. Sometimes the season you’re in calls for the kind of work that simply preserves what you already have, without trying to aggressively build on it.
That’s not failure. That’s discipline. And it’s a skill that’s at least as hard to develop as the ambition to build in the first place.
The point
It’s all well and good to choose someone who promises to deliver something that glistens with newness.
But are they prepared to keep polishing it, regularly and consistently, so that it doesn’t lose its shine?
Choose someone who is.
Wax on, wax off, my friend.
Mark Debono is the founder of Systemato and an independent marketing and communications consultant. He has a label printer, a water softener, and strong opinions about maintenance schedules.
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