Edwin Catmull Quotes
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You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.
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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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His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous—“These charts are bullshit!” or “This deal is crap!”—and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come back at him, he often respected it—poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it.
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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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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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Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.
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Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them—and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.
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Success hides problems...you don't need to address problems.
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If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
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I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth.
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Art isn't about drawing; it's about learning to see. What organization doesn't need this ability?
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The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creative—whatever form that creativity takes—and that to encourage such development is a noble thing.
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Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly.
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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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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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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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Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
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When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
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We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission.
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It isn't enough to pick a path—you must go down it. By doing so, you see things you couldn't possibly see when you started out; you may not like what you see, some of it may be confusing, but at least you will have, as we like to say, "explored the neighborhood." The key point here is that even if you decide you're in the wrong place, there is still time to head toward the right place.
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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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We are meaning-making creatures who read other people’s subtle clues just as they read ours.
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Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.
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While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.