Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

by Ed Catmull

What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it.

What interested me was not that companies rose and fell or that the landscape continually shifted as technology changed but that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.

We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling

that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify

believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe

that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them.

They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and st...

them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anythi...

Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may b...

Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever ...

When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

And ever since, I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am.

manager: By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless.

Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

“When I don’t see eye to eye with somebody, I just take the time to explain it better, so they understand the way it should be.”

deciding what it is that they should be focusing on. There is nothing in this advice that gives you any idea how to figure out where the focus should be, or how to apply your energy to it.

The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line.

Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.

Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.

It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.

order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence.

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy—trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it—dooms you to fail.

“Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As

opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of...

And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become w...

They will also begin to see the upside of decisiveness: The time they’ve saved by not gnashing their teeth about whether they’re on the right course comes in handy when they hit a dead end and need to reboot.

It isn’t enough to pick a path—you must go down it.

By doing so, you see things you couldn’t possibly see when you started out; you may not like what you see, some of it

Pilots

For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there.

So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.

The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There’s

just start

Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

In ancient Greek mythology, Apollo, god of poetry and prophecy, falls in love with the beautiful Cassandra, daughter of the king and queen of Troy, whose tangle of red hair and alabaster skin is famed throughout the land. He woos her by giving her a rare and treasured gift—the ability to see the future—and, in response, she agrees to be his consort. But when she later betrays him and breaks that vow, a furious Apollo curses her with a kiss, breathing words into her mouth that forever take away her powers of persuasion. From that day forward, she is doomed to scream into the wind: No one will believe the truths she speaks, and everyone judges her to be insane. Though Cassandra foresees the coming destruction of Troy—she warns that a Greek army will sneak into the city inside a huge wooden horse—she is unable to prevent the tragedy because no one heeds her warning.

it. While character is crucial, I am also certain there were an infinite number of “two-inch” events aside from my own that went our way—events that I have no way of knowing about because they occurred in the lives of other people who were critical to forming Pixar.

The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close.

But they are each unique to us—no one can see relationships quite the way we do. If only we could remember that!

Most of us walk around thinking that our view is best—probably because it is the only one we really know.

1960s by Peter Wason,

Our mental models aren’t reality.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, the phrase is ridiculous—something said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden.

The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.

It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail.

My old friend from the University of Utah, Alan Kay—Apple’s chief scientist and the man who introduced me to Steve Jobs—expressed it well when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out.

“If you think, you stink.”

“The goal is to get so comfortable and relaxed with your instrument, or process, that you can just get Zen with it and let the music flow without thinking,”