By SteveJack
There is a small town that stands astride a decent-sized stream behind a thick forest of evergreens, deep at the bottom of jagged peaks covered with snow. And in that town, at the end of a long, narrow, cobblestone street is a small shop that sells chocolate. Not just any chocolate, but the chocolate; the one chocolatiers the world over try to achieve, but never seem to come close. The shop makes and sells this one chocolate, not a variety of sweets, just perfect bars of chocolate, sold by the pound. All of the townsfolk know of the tiny shop, so that’s where they buy their chocolate. This is the town to live in if you’re a chocoholic.
The tiny shop’s proprietor, a middle aged man, is a master chocolatier who seemed to have been born knowing how to mix cocoa and sugar and cream in the correct amounts to produce perfection. He had long ago hung a small sign outside his shop that states simply, “chocolate shop.” The townspeople know they have a genius in their midst and they gladly pay a small premium for his wonderfully smooth and rich confection.
Years before, as a younger man, the chocolatier had taken an apprentice who was eager to learn how to make the chocolate, but on a much grander scale, with modern factory equipment. The apprentice knew this was the chocolate, the kind the world only dreamed about, and he wanted to make it by the ton, not the pound, and he wanted to sell it everywhere, not just in the small town surrounded by mountains and forest. The master chocolatier explained that his chocolate could not be made and sold this way. The magic was in the recipe and the care with which the ingredients were folded together. A large factory wouldn’t be able to produce his chocolate in the perfect way and it wouldn’t taste or feel the same.
The apprentice tried to explain to the master that it didn’t matter, that it would still be better than almost any chocolate anywhere and the world would beat down their door to buy it. It just had to be good enough. They could advertise it on signs everywhere and give out samples in stores in every city and town. They would make millions, the apprentice pleaded over and over, but the master simply wouldn’t hear of it. “It won’t be perfect and I don’t really believe in advertising anyway,” he finally said. And with that, just six months into a five-year apprenticeship, they parted ways.
Of course, you already know what happened: the apprentice knew enough of the recipe to go off on his own, gather financing, build factories, bring aboard partners, hire advertising agencies and marketers and ended up selling the world his chocolate. And the world is none the wiser, it tastes good enough to them, for they have never been to the small town deep in the woods behind the mountains and tasted the chocolate at the end of the cobblestone street.
To this day, the master continues to sell his chocolate, the chocolate, to the small town’s grateful townsfolk. He was content to make the perfect chocolate until he received, by his count, the one-thousandth flyer for the apprentice’s chocolate proclaiming it to be the “world’s perfect chocolate.” By then, those flyers’ claims had worn the master’s patience thin. He said to himself, simply, “it’s time.”
And so, the master went to work, blending, and mixing, and testing, and retesting. After almost a week of continuous work, he stopped and looked at the product of his labor: a machine that could produce millions of identical small confections that weighed just a few ounces. The secret of his tiny new sweet was that, once eaten, it produced a hunger that only his chocolate, the perfect chocolate, could satisfy. You see, each of the new tiny white treats, while not exactly chocolate themselves, held a bit of the master’s magic hidden inside.
The master took some of his chocolate savings and, despite his reservations, purchased advertising, brought aboard a few select partners of his own, hired marketers and began to sell the world his new little sweet. Upon hearing of it, the apprentice scoffed at the tiny new sweet, having convinced himself long ago that his chocolate actually was the best in the world, and thought that the master had given up trying to compete with him in the chocolate business and was desperately trying something new. Bored, and without bothering to even taste the master’s treat, he half-heartedly instructed his workers and partners to come up with something similar – after all, he might as well profit from this new dessert fad, too.
That’s where the story stands today. The master does not advertise or promote his perfect chocolate, he sells the world his smaller confection, believing that it will soon begin to sell his chocolate for him. All the while, right now in fact, he is busy making extra chocolate and storing it away in preparation for the future. It’s an interesting way to go about it, and the rest of the story’s still to be told, but already some who have tasted his small-but-tasty treat have traveled from far and wide to the small town that stands astride a decent-sized stream behind a thick forest of evergreens, deep at the bottom of jagged peaks covered with snow just to satisfy their hunger for his perfect chocolate.
Now they know what the townsfolk have known for years. And they’re telling their friends.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.