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

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

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

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

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.

If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.

Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

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.

When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

When faced with a challenge, get smarter.

Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.

What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?

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.

You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

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.

You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.

The future is not a destination - it is a direction.

What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.

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.

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.

Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.

it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

Quality is the best business plan.

We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.

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.

I tend to flood and freeze up if I’m feeling overwhelmed. When this happens, it’s usually because I feel like the world is crashing down and all is 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.

We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission.

THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.