WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, I stumbled across a small paperback autobiography by Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. As I remember it, Kroc described the epiphany that was the seed of his whole empire: The key to creating a successful hamburger restaurant is not the hamburger, it’s the fries. People want really good french fries. Much of the book was taken up with Kroc’s quest, and there really is no other word to describe it, to create the perfect french fry–what potatoes to use, how to slice them, how to dry them, etc. This was a man who devoted his life to making good fries. At one point, if I recall, Kroc says that french fries are his religion. Naturally, I was impressed by this statement of faith. If, at 13 or 14, I had been blessed with the same sort of practical fervor that Kroc possessed, I would have had a life-transforming moment reading that book. Ah! I would have exclaimed, Find Your Fry! Follow Your Fry! I would have had myself grow up to be about 6’5″ with a monumental head of hair and enormous teeth, and I would have become a motivational speaker (because in every gold rush, it’s mostly the people selling pans who get rich). And my message would have been Find Your Fry! Follow Your Fry! If I had done this, books like “Who Moved My Cheese?”, currently in its third or fourth century on the bestseller lists, would be a mere footnote in publishing history. I’d be the one with the line of motivational videos, starring in Caribbean cruise seminars, holding $2-million-a-throw pep rallies for mid-level corporate dreamers in exurban sports arenas. The message of Find Your Fry! Follow Your Fry! would be that the key to success in this world is having the ability to focus an entire lifetime’s worth of fevered zealotry on one trivial thing, product line, or concept. Religious people spread their zealotry around on a vast eschatology. Political zealots spread theirs across a huge vision of society. But Ray Kroc’s zealotry lasered down on that one thing, the fry. For him, the fry was the alpha and the omega, the burning center under his magnifying glass-concentrated beam of energy and ambition. So you must Find Your Fry! (in motivational speaking, it’s important to keep the uppercase letters and the exclamation points). You must find the insight or product wrinkle that will become your own personal key to paradise. Once you have that life-altering moment when you and your Fry! become one, every waking hour is devoted to your Fry! Every thought, when you are 20 and when you are 60, is devoted to the ultimate realization of your Fry! And you come to believe that your Fry!, if you can only perfect it, will change the world. If you can make the perfect Fry!, then peoples will unite, enmities will fade, history will come to a glorious completion, and you, not coincidentally, will become enormously rich and successful. On May 13, the Wall Street Journal published an advertising supplement called “The New Pioneers” which contained a series of articles on business people who are working on technology’s cutting edge. They were all Fry! followers. When Helen Greiner was 11, she went to see “Star Wars” and she saw R2-D2 and she thought, “Robots!” She’s devoted her whole life to small robots. She went off to M.I.T., interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and now she runs iRobot Corp., which is going to build little robots. Within 10 years, she insists, every U.S. home with a computer is going to have a robot too. “If we don’t take robotics to the next level,” she declares, “we’ll have a lot of explaining to do to our grandchildren.” The Journal profiled other Fry!-ists. Charles Lieber has devoted himself to growing nanowires, only a few atoms thick, that will conduct electricity. “It’s really an amazing time . . . My students are working day and night, and . . . I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” he exclaims. Mary-Dell Chilton is working on a technique to place new genes onto specific spots on plant chromosomes. “I am in the lab day, night, Sundays and holidays,” says the woman who has been labeled the Queen of Agrobacterium. Balanced perspective is not exactly a feature of the people the Journal profiled. If you met them on a cruise (assuming they ever took vacations), you would find that they are not scintillating conversationalists, having absolutely no interest in any topic other than their Fry! But I do believe, breaking all the rules of all the philosophers, that they are happy in their narrowness. And there is something noteworthy about their Herculean arrogance. They really do think they are going to change the world. And some of them will make measurable contributions to human life. Ray Kroc, the man who worshipped at the altar of the french fry, really did learn how to make quite good ones. –David Brooks
