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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ed Catmull
Read between
May 30 - June 5, 2023
Being too risk-averse causes many companies to stop innovating and to reject new ideas, which is the first step on the path to irrelevance.
One of the biggest barriers is fear, and while failure comes with the territory, fear shouldn’t have to. The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure—to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.
The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world.
To confide in employees is to give them a sense of ownership over the information.
Your employees are smart; that’s why you hired them. So treat them that way.
Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
From 1994 to 2010, not a single Disney animated film would open at number one at the box office. I believe this was the direct result of its employees thinking that their job was to feed the Beast.
When I advocate for protecting the new, then, I am using the word somewhat differently. I am saying that when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it.
Think of a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly—it only survives because it is encased in a cocoon. It survives, in other words, because it is protected from that which would damage it. It is protected from the Beast.
they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win.
Our mental image of balance is somewhat distorted because we tend to equate it with stillness—the calm repose of a yogi balancing on one leg, a state without apparent motion. To my mind, the more accurate examples of balance come from sports, such as when a basketball player spins around a defender, a running back bursts through the line of scrimmage, or a surfer catches a wave.
I often say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions.
Last year, we had ten thousand applications for a hundred spots.
Managers do not need to work hard to protect established ideas or ways of doing business. The system is tilted to favor the incumbent.
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy,” Ego says. “We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”
People want to hang on to things that work—stories that work, methods that work, strategies that work. You figure something out, it works, so you keep doing it—this is what an organization that is committed to learning does. And as we become successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change.
If you polled the employees of any creative company, my guess is that the vast majority would say they believe in change. But my experience, postmerger, taught me something else: Fear of change—innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason—is a powerful force.
“If I start on a film and right away know the structure—where it’s going, the plot—I don’t trust it,” Pete says. “I feel like the only reason we’re able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start. This could just be my Lutheran, Scandinavian upbringing, but I believe life should not be easy. We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things—which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable. Living through a few big catastrophes helps. After people survived A Bug’s Life and
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For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre—personally, I think the person who can’t change his or her mind is dangerous.
Politicians master whatever system it took to get elected, and afterward there is little incentive to change it.
Self-interest guides opposition to change, but lack of self-awareness fuels it even more.
Once you master any system, you typically become blind to its flaws;
But while each rule may have been instituted for good reason, after a while a thicket of rules develops that may not make sense in the aggregate.
“Play the ball where the monkey drops it.”
We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can’t be anticipated.
If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified.
Occam’s Razor, attributed to William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century English logician.
Professionals such as doctors or plumbers also have a similar distribution in their abilities—some are extraordinary, and some you wouldn’t trust to tie your shoes. But most exist in the range between excellent and bumbling.
Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of
the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future.
During the intensive research phase of the film, Pete was surprised to hear from a neuroscientist that only about 40 percent of what we think we “see” comes in through
our eyes. “The rest is made up from memory or patterns that we recognize from past experience,” he told me.
However, the magician doesn’t create the illusion—we do.
Alva Noe, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley who focuses on theories of perception, has suggested another way of thinking about consciousness—as something we do, or enact, or perform in our dynamic involvement with the world around us.
That’s because when humans see things that challenge our mental models, we tend not just to resist them but to ignore them.
The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.
“Mark talks to you as if he’s trying to drown out an F5 class tornado behind him—and winning,” is how one animator described him. “I suspect he consumes plutonium pills.”
when the embarrassment goes away, people become more creative.
When filmmakers, industrial designers, software designers, or people in any other creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is craft without art.
Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.
You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.
In our view, the oversight group added nothing to the process but tension.
The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we
enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up?
technology, art, and business
“Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.”
Some might have lost sleep over the two million dollars we expended on this experiment. But we consider it money well spent. As Joe Ranft said at the time, “Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.”
(This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.)
is a fact of life, though a confounding one, that focusing on something can make it more difficult to see.
Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional.
