Edwin Catmull Quotes
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You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.
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Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t.
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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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The future is not a destination - it is a direction.
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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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What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?
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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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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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Every creative person can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace.
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You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.
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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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THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.
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By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed the safer path and were the lesser for it...I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded that greatest reward...Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.
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Good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.
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What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position—that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.
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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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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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Quality is the best business plan.
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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.
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Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.
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Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.
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Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.
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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.