Edwin Catmull Quotes
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The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.” Believe me, you don’t want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out. The best inoculation against this fate? Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close.
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Instead of saying, ‘The writing in this scene isn’t good enough,’ you say, ‘Don’t you want people to walk out of the theater and be quoting those lines?’ It’s more of a challenge.
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We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.
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If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it. Or they'll throw it away and come up with something else.
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Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.
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Quality is the best business plan.
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People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in 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. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.
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Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way.
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Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.
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Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t.
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For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.
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Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
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It's pretty popular today to say that everybody should learn to fail and that failure's a good thing. Intellectually, it's an obvious thing. But in fact, it gets conflated with another meaning of failure, so when we grow up as kids, failing in school was a really bad thing.
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We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions.
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Every creative person can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace.
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But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself. 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.
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Uncertainty and change are life's constraints. And that's the fun part.
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For me, creativity includes problem-solving. That's the broad definition of it.
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The first principle was “Story Is King,” by which we meant that we would let nothing—not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—get in the way of our story.
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If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
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THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.
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You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.
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You can give a great film idea to a mediocre team and they may screw it up, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will turn it into a great film.
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I 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 strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.