Five For Your Hive: Make What You Want To Make

Steve Jobs, An iPod That Makes Calls, James Cameron, If You Like How It Sounds, The Creative Act

Make What You Want To Make

Conventional business wisdom says that companies should always give customers what they want. Instead of reinventing the wheel, companies should follow trends and culture of the time to create products that would appeal to users. In 1984, on the day Jobs unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?” To Jobs, products, not profit, were his intrinsic motivation—He wanted to create world-class products so that people will love it without even knowing they love it. “Some people say, ‘Give the customer what they want,’ but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.” Building, creating, producing what you want to build, create, produce, and knowing that the world will love it because you love it—that’s the idea for today.

An iPod That Makes Calls

Fast forward to 2005, iPod sales were skyrocketing. In that year alone, 20 million units were sold. Most CEOs and investors would be off-the-roof with those numbers, but not Jobs. In fact, it made him worried. “He was always obsessing about what could mess us up,” an executive recalled. At that time, mobile phones were on the rise. Like how the digital camera market was decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras, if phone manufacturers started to build music players into their phones, that would spell the end of the iPod. In that period, Jobs noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank. “We would sit around talking about how much we hated our phones,” Jobs said, “They were way too complicated. They had features nobody could figure out, including the address book. It was Byzantine.” During meetings, Jobs would get bored and grab an executive’s phone and “start pointing out all the ways it was ‘brain-dead’” And so, the team was excited by their next big project: to make a mobile phone. In June 2007, the iPhone went on sale. The biggest competitor to the iPhone, then, was the BlackBerry. It was famed for its keyboard—the feature most beloved by users. Jobs’ iPhone, however, was incomparable in taste and design, nothing anyone has seen before: A rectangular-shaped black mirror bordered by a metal rim controlled by a concave, depressed button. For $500, “It’s the most expensive phone in the world,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in an interview shortly after its release, “It doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard,” and it was a far reach to anything near successful. But Jobs understood desire. He was driven to create a phone that he would want to use, not by what customers want because customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones—basically an iPod that makes calls—and reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cell phone market, relegated BlackBerry in the process and shaped the legacy of smartphones we know of today.

I Want To See It

Canadian filmmaker James Cameron [The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic] met with 20th Century Fox after he submitted a cut of his latest film for approval. There was one part—a three-minute flying scene—that worried the execs. “Why is the flying scene so long?” one executive asked. “It doesn’t advance the narrative or the character.” Fearing it might influence the box office, they wanted him to shorten it or cut it out entirely. “You’re right on every count,” Cameron replied, “You’ve ticked every box, like a good studio executive…But guess what? I want to see it. And if I want to see it, my cognitive leap is there are going to be other people that want to see it.” “Well,” Cameron said in a later interview of Avatar, “it turned out that the flying scene is what the audience loved most, in terms of our exit polling and data gathering.”

If You Like How It Sounds…

When Finneas O’Connell was 13 years old, he called his friend’s dad who was a professional music producer. While dabbling with music-producing software, Finneas stumbled upon a tool called a limiter which music producers use to control the volume of sound. After some experimentation, he wanted to know if he was using it correctly. “Finneas,” his friend’s dad told him, “Listen, it’s really important that you understand the delineation between the correct way to do something and whether you like it or not. There’s always going to be someone in the music world to tell you why you did something incorrectly, why this is too that or that is too this. So it’s really important to like something or not like it…If somebody tells you, ‘That vocal is too compressed,’ that might be true. If they don’t like the song, the compressed vocal might be the reason. But if you say, ‘No, no, no, I compressed it that way on purpose. I like it,’—if you like how it sounds, then it’s the correct way.”

There is Only Your Way

In The Creative Act, legendary music producer Rick Rubin speaks remarkably of the connection between oneself and the act of creation. “One person’s connected place may be another’s distraction,” Rubin writes, “And different environments may be right at different points in your artistic process.” “Andy Warhol was said to create with a television, radio, and record player all on simultaneously. For Eminem, the noise of a single TV set is his preferred backdrop for writing. Marcel Proust lined his walls with sound-absorbing cork, closed the drapes, and wore earplugs. Kafka too took his need for silence to an extreme—‘not like a hermit’…but ‘like a dead man.’” Ultimately, when it comes to creating products or films or music, the best approach is to make what you want to make. “There is no wrong way,” Rubin says, “There is only your way.” There is only your approach. And because you love it, because your passion and dedication and spirit of excellence can be felt through your creation, people will love it even before they know they love it.