Last friday was the culmination of a story many years in the making. In more ways than one, it’s the ultimate fish-out-of-water tale about someone who doesn’t follow the rest of the pack. Someone with impeccable taste who, against all odds, is able to summon a kitchen of wizards, unite them under one purpose and live up to the harshest critics and the highest expectations. Someone who just… does things differently.
I am talking about Remy, the rodent star of the new Pixar movie:
Remy from Ratatouille, doing “the pinch” on his imaginary iPhone
Steve Jobs must’ve had a hell of a weekend.
Think it was chance that Pixar’s lastest coming-of-age story coincided with the launch of the iPhone? Or is it just my Apple-fanboyism reading too much into it? Possibly.
But check this out: The New York Times spoke to Thomas Keller, a chef at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., for a piece in their Dining section about Ratatouille. The Pixar folks worked alongside Keller to learn what it feels like to work in a gourmet kitchen. It’s an excellent story on how curious and experience-driven Pixar is - how their employees have a natural urge to learn how the world works. But towards the end, there’s this little gem:
Mr. Keller, who describes “Ratatouille” as “extraordinarily clever,” said he is impressed with the film’s dedication to kitchen detail. But he is more taken with its ultimate message: in a nutshell, don’t listen to anyone but yourself.
“It’s about somebody who is willing to take the risk, to take the gamble on doing something regardless of what the critic is going to say about it,” Mr. Keller said.
Was Ratatouille a hat-tip to the Apple way of doing things? Compare that to this quote from Mr. Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech a few years ago:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Quite poetic, huh?
The bottom line is that Apple is driven by beliefs. They have a point of view on the world. This is something that so many companies lack. This is why I waited in line for hours with hundreds of thousands of others across the country:
And it was totally worth it. The iPhone is a dream. It’s astonishing that a piece of mass-produced technology with so many different elements could work so beautifully. The moment you start using it, it feels immediately natural. It’s nothing short of magic. My iPhone has already become an indispensable part of my life.
I’ve said before that this is a device that only Apple could have made. I cited Apple’s ability to build on its own technology as the main reason for this. But now it’s more clear than ever that Apple wouldn’t be where they are in the first place if they didn’t believe in themselves enough to take those risks.
That’s the moral of the story, and Apple is proof that this kind of stuff doesn’t only happen in the movies.
