The Most Helpful Quotes from Creativity, Inc.

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation—you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.

“fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.”

There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat.

The first two years of a movie’s development should be a time of solidifying the story beats by relentlessly testing them—much like you temper steel.
The language they used to talk about the issues showed that they thought of them as their own. “Is there a way, other than Braintrust notes, that we could do a better job of teaching our directors the importance of an emotional arc?” asked one person. “I feel like I should be formally sharing my experience with other people,” said another. I could not have been prouder.

He pointed out that if you stumble when you try to read it aloud, you’d better fix that sentence. Every day I had to read five pages of what I had written.

It is management’s job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy—as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run. I’m here to say that it can be done—but it is an unending job. A good manager must always be on the lookout for areas in which balance has been lost.

One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to make a list of what’s actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So it’s really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.

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. Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I don’t know anyone who thought he was weak.

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. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can’t completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure,
People who act without an approved plan should not be punished for “going rogue.” A culture that allows everyone, no matter their position, to stop the assembly line, both figuratively and literally, maximizes the creative engagement of people who want to help. In other words, we must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses.

Unless you impose limits, people will always justify spending more time and more money by saying, “We’re just trying to make a better movie.” This occurs not because people are greedy or wasteful but because they care about their particular part of the film and don’t necessarily have a clear view of how it fits into the whole. They believe that investing more is the only way to succeed.

Bob from the early days of Disney. They were conflicted, therefore, about using certain newer technologies—VHS videotape, for example—that had not existed in the studio’s heyday. If Walt’s Nine Old Men didn’t use videotape, Andrew remembers telling Bob McCrea one day, maybe he shouldn’t either. “Don’t be an idiot,” Bob said. “If we’d had those tools then, we would have used them.

We liked his work and sensibility but sensed it would be wise to try him out on a short first to determine not only whether he had filmmaking chops but also if he could work well with others. The first sign of trouble? The film he delivered clocked in at twelve minutes—more of a “medium” than a “short.” But length is flexible; the real problem was that although the director was extraordinarily creative, he was unable to settle on a spine for a story. The piece meandered, lacked focus, and thus packed no emotional punch. It wouldn’t be the first time we would find someone who was able to invent wildly creative elements but was unable to solve the problems of story—the central and most important creative challenge. So we pulled the plug. 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.)

Pixar employees must remain free to exercise their creative freedom with their titles and names on their business cards; number 33 ensured that Pixar’s people could continue to exert “personal cube/office/space decorating to reflect person’s individuality.”) Some sought to preserve popular company rituals. (Number 12: “Event parties (holiday, wrap, various events) are prevalent at Pixar.

No assigned parking for any employee, including executives. All spaces are first-come, first served.”)

If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.

Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them even when they do screw up.

The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal—it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.

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. And that’s as it should be.

A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well.