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

by Ed Catmull

The point is, we value self-expression here. This tends to make a big impression on visitors, who often tell me that the experience of walking into Pixar leaves them feeling a little wistful, like something is missing in their work lives—a palpable energy, a feeling of collaboration and unfettered creativity, a sense, not to be corny, of possibility. I respond by telling them that the feeling they are picking up on—call it exuberance or irreverence, even whimsy—is integral to our success.

There were plenty of moments when the future of Pixar was in doubt. Now, we were suddenly being held up as an example of what could happen when artists trusted their guts.

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 those impediments and fix them.

More interesting to me, though, are the blocks that get in the way, often without us noticing, and hinder the creativity that resides within any thriving company.

Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

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

Without intending to, we’d created an obstacle that discouraged people from jumping in.

Because the seating arrangements and place cards were designed for the convenience of the leaders, including me.

SNL. Seth Meyers. Easy to navigage the politics when you're on top.

Looking back, I still admire that enlightened reaction to a serious threat: We’ll just have to get smarter.

When faced with a challenge, get smarter.

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

So Alvy lobbied for “Pixer,” which he imagined to be a (fake) Spanish verb meaning “to make pictures.” Loren countered with “Radar,” which he thought sounded more high-tech. That’s when it hit them: Pixer + radar = Pixar! It stuck.

They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable.

If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible.

This was my first encounter with a phenomenon I would notice again and again, throughout my career: For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing problems.

“Story Is King,”

We took pride in the fact that reviewers talked mainly about the way Toy Story made them feel and not about the computer wizardry that enabled us to get it up on the screen.

“Trust the Process.”

This was a little scary, but it also felt like an affirmation of our core values.

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.

It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched.

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

Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.

But a movie is not one idea, it’s a multitude of them.

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

Though Pixar didn’t rely on a traditional assembly line—that is, with conveyor belts connecting each work station—the making of a film happened in order, with each team passing the product, or idea, off to the next, who pushed it further down the line. To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line.

More and more, I saw that by putting people first—not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took—we were protecting that culture.

Supporting your employees means encouraging them to strike a balance not merely by saying, “Be balanced!” but also by making it easier for them to achieve balance.

Merely repeating ideas means nothing.

Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase.

Advertisers look for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself.

When someone comes up with a phrase that

sticks, it becomes a meme, which migrates around even as it disconnects from its original meaning.

This isn’t just some pie-in-the-sky idea—without the critical ingredient that is candor, there can be no trust. And without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.

Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are.

“It’s like I can put my crossword puzzle away and help you with your Rubik’s Cube a little bit,” is how he puts it.

That’s how much candor matters at Pixar: It overrides hierarchy.

After the meeting, Andrew went off and wrote an entirely new ending in which EVE saves WALL-E, and at the next screening, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or—worse!—aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of.

Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).

people. As I’ve mentioned, he’s known around Pixar for repeating the phrases “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.”

While such scrutiny may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it had a chilling effect on research. No one wanted to “win” a Golden Fleece Award because, under the guise of avoiding waste, its organizers had inadvertently made it dangerous and embarrassing for everyone to make mistakes.

In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.

While the process was difficult and time consuming, Pete and his crew never believed that a failed approach meant that they had failed.

That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information.

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).

When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.