Pretty cool story, this.
Ray Kroc’s voice carries through the whole book, like an old-timey movie peppered with Cagney-esque bluster and corny expressions: “Now we’re cooking with gas!” That sort of vibe.
You should know that he spent the majority of his adult life doing things that were decidedly not–McDonald’s-y. Dude was a hustler, a high school dropout, a piano bar player-on-the-side, among many other things.
Mcdonald’s as we know it didn’t happen until Ray was 52 years old. He’d already worked for 30 years as a salesman of paper cups and milkshake makers. But after meeting the McDonald brothers in 1954 and convincing them to let him handle the expansion, he turned McDonald’s into the biggest franchise in the world in less than a decade.
Kroc was all about streamlining processes and figuring out the most efficient way to do things. Then he made the “new and improved” the new standard in every location in the world.
When considering the McDonald’s story from afar, it seems like Kroc finally came upon the business/project/passion that he was looking for his whole life. This strikes me as incredibly inspiring and should put at ease (or at least give a bit of hope to) those who haven’t figured out who they are by the time they’re 25, or whatever asinine metric and timeline we’re using these day.
It’s powerful to think that whatever we are doing today is preparing us for what we would like to achieve or who we would like to become tomorrow.
Quotes from the book that resonated the most with me follow:
1. If you believe in something, you’ve got to be in it to the ends of your toes.
2. I refused to worry about more than one thing at a time–I would not let useless fretting about a problem keep me from sleep.
3. Perfection is very difficult to achieve, but everything else was secondary.
4. Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
5. Stress your own strengths and the competition will wear itself out trying to keep up.
6. Usually there’s no reason both sides can’t come out winners.
7. If you are willing to take big risks, you are bound to blow one once in awhile; when you strike out, learn as much as you can.
8. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
9. You have to learn to know the joy of “working and being let work.”
10. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.
But I would never eat there,
–Thomas