"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." ~ Steve Jobs

NOT because you want to be popular.

NOT because you want to make money (or worse, "easy money").

NOT because it will show off how smart or creative you are.

NOT because it uses cool technology.

This is not about extrinsic success.

The rest of these (artistic merit, technical innovation, making boatloads of money) are side effects of successful vision and impeccable execution.

Anyway, I wanted to explain the emphasis I put on just how much you want to really desire to create what you're making, to be dying to get it in front of people. So here's the part I wanted to excerpt from the interview that really gives you folks in News.YC-land the sense of how driven you want to be:

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Interviewer Andrew Gordon: What would you say is the hardest thing about directing an animated movie?

Andrew Stanton: The hardest thing about directing an animated movie is keeping yourself excited about it. It's hard enough to make the crew excited about it, but keeping yourself excited about it -- trying to remind yourself why you wanted to do it. Because it's all about the details once you really start making the movie.

It's no different than building a house, or, building a really extravagant mansion. There's a million details that you have to spend more time with after the bigger ideas of where the rooms are going to go and how it's going to be structured, and it can get you kind of bogged down.

Joe Ranft used to have this great expression that there's always a point during the making of a movie where there's sort of the Columbus where-is-the-land moment, where everybody on the boat is going "You promised us the land. Where's the land? We're not seeing it!"

And people get bogged down in all the minor problems or the major problems that won't go away, and it's all justified -- it's all legitimate to have that response.

So, for me, to prevent that is to get really, really picky about what story you're going to tell up front. And this is my opinion, and it's not a rule. But if I have an idea that I kinda like, then I don't want to do it. If I have an idea that affects every fiber of my being, like "I want to see that movie made whether I make it or not" -- it's like that idea has to get on the screen -- that's a real good quality to start with. Because it's going to get attacked for the next four years. And there's going to be, sometimes, weeks or months where nothing seems to be going right.

[...]

It's like looking for oil or something -- it's like "where can I find something that has enough fuel that's going to keep me going for years?" Because there's going to large stretches of time where nothing is working, nobody's happy, everybody thinks that the sky is going to fall, and what's going to get me out of bed is just because that idea still has to be on the screen.

So I want that when I'm going to go into battle. Because it's going to be battle. So if I don't have that going in, then I won't go into it -- I won't make that movie. And I'm starting to try and insist on that with other filmmakers here at Pixar, because I just know the benefits of it.

nice followup..