Steven Mackenzie

In 1991, Pixar struck a deal with Disney to make the first computer-animated movie. At the time, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull explained, “We didn’t have any storytellers among us.” Catmull and most of his employees were computer scientists. To learn how to tell a good story, The team attended STORY—a 3-day storytelling seminar taught by screenwriter and story consultant Robert Mckee. The Pixar team left the seminar, one Pixar employee said, “as true believers [in] McKee’s doctrine that...character emerges most realistically and compellingly from the choices that the protagonist makes in reaction to his problems . . . This became the law of the land at Pixar.” Essentially, McKee teaches that the beating heart of a good story is a character who wants something and has to overcome a series of problems to get it. Guided by this principle, the Pixar team wrote a story about a toy named Woody who wants to keep his position as a boy named Andy’s favorite toy. “Woody's world is rocked,” Catmull writes in summing up the plot, “when a shiny new rival, a space ranger named Buzz Lightyear, arrives on the scene and becomes the apple of Andy's eye.” That problem would become the beating heart of “Toy Story,” which released in 1995 and was a critical and commercial sensation. Following the success of Toy Story, Pixar returned repeatedly to McKee’s principle. One of Pixar's character designers said, “We really really followed McKee almost to the letter of the law.” The former Head of Pixar's Creative Development team added, “Our movies are very conventional, in terms of story conventions like character arcs. If you look at all of our movies, there’s a protagonist who...goes on a journey and comes out the other end a better person . . . or rat . . . or fish.” Takeaway 1: The decision to attend the storytelling seminar was rooted in a lesson Catmull learned when he was 12 years old in 1957. That year, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) into Earth's orbit. "Since we’d been taught that the Communists were the enemy," Catmull writes, "the fact that they’d beaten us into space seemed pretty scary—proof that they had the upper hand." The U.S. government responded by recruiting the country's best minds and creating something called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). The architects of ARPA, Catmull points out, said in response to a serious threat: 'We'll just have to get smarter.' The Pixar team attended the storytelling seminar because, Catmull writes, “The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.” Takeaway 2: Woody's response to the Buzz problem, ARPA's response to the Sputnik 1 problem, Catmull's response to the storytelling problem—as Robert McKee likes to say, “What’s true of life is true of fiction,” and what’s true of fiction is true of life: “True Character is revealed in the choices [made] under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.” - - - “When faced with a challenge, get smarter.” — Ed Catmull Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

Shortly after Steve Jobs returned as the CEO of Apple in 1997, he met with Jony Ive, Apple’s Senior VP of industrial design. Apple had 40 products on the market. “Jony, how many things have you said no to?” Jobs asked. Ive was confused. “You have to understand,” Jobs said, “There are measures of focus, and one of them is how often you say no.” “What focus means,” Jobs taught Ive, “is saying no to something that you—with every bone in your body—think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.” Jobs walked up to a whiteboard and drew a 2 x 2 grid. On top, he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional.” Down the side, “Portable” and “Desktop.” Four products—meet Apple’s new radically focused product line, Jobs said. After that meeting, over the next two decades, Jobs and Ive—focused on making a few high-quality products while saying no to everything else—transformed a dying, near-bankrupt company into one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth over $2.9 trillion. Takeaway 1: The philosopher Marcus Aurelius pointed out that the focus of doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” You get the satisfaction of having fewer things to do. And…you get the satisfaction of doing those fewer things at a higher level. You get “to do less, better.” During Steve Jobs’ first visit to Jony Ive’s design studio, he looked around, and then he said, “Fuck, you’ve not been very effective, have you?” It was clear to Jobs that Ive was full of ideas and potential he wasn’t able to execute or fulfill under Apple’s previous leadership. In the Jobs era of “doing less, better,” Ive was very effective. Some products he designed include: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Takeaway 2: Even though he slashed the product line down to four products, Jobs loved to have and hear ideas. “Steve used to say to me,” Ive said, “and he used to say this a lot, ‘Hey, Jony, here’s a dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were: really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us both completely silent.” It made me think of what Jerry Seinfeld identifies as the ultimate skill of the artist: “taste and discernment.” “It’s one thing to create,” Seinfeld says. It’s one thing to have ideas. “The other is you have to choose. ‘What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?’” What are we going to add to the product line, and what are we not going to add? “This is a gigantic aspect of [artistic] survival,” Seinfeld continues. “It’s kind of unseen—what’s picked and what is discarded—but mastering that is how you stay alive.” - - - “Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.” — Steve Jobs Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!