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

by Ed Catmull

So we’ve covered change. Where does randomness fit in? Once, when I was on a retreat in Marin, I heard a delightful—and possibly apocryphal—story about what happened when the British introduced golf to India in the 1820s. Upon building the first golf course there, the Royal Calcutta, the British discovered a problem: Indigenous monkeys were intrigued by the little white balls and would swoop down out of the trees and onto the fairways, picking them up and carrying them off. This was a disruption, to say the least. In response, officials tried erecting fences to keep the monkeys out, but the monkeys climbed right over. They tried capturing and relocating the monkeys, but the monkeys kept coming back. They tried loud noises to scare them away. Nothing worked. In the end, they arrived at a solution: They added a new rule to the game—“Play the ball where the monkey drops it.” Randomness is part of the folklore of history and literature; it has been studied extensively by mathematicians, scientists, and statisticians; it is deeply embedded in everything we do. We are aware of it in the abstract sense, by which I mean we have developed methods to acknowledge its existence. We talk about lucky breaks, good days and bad days, crazy coincidences, fortune smiling upon us, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time; we know that a drunk driver can come out of nowhere or, as the saying goes, that we could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Yet randomness remains stubbornly difficult to unde...