90 Top Quotes From Creativity Inc
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, is an engrossing memoir and management guide that unveils the secrets behind the unparalleled success of Pixar as an innovative and creative powerhouse. Catmull shares his remarkable journey in shaping Pixar's culture of creativity, risk-taking, and relentless pursuit of excellence. From the early days of computer animation to the groundbreaking success of films like "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo," the book chronicles the challenges and triumphs faced by Pixar in its pursuit of groundbreaking storytelling and animation.
Catmull reveals the importance of fostering an environment where creativity can thrive, emphasizing the value of candid communication, constructive criticism, and learning from failure. The book offers practical strategies for nurturing creativity in organizations, encouraging leaders to empower their teams, embrace uncertainty, and create a culture that embraces continuous improvement. Beyond the captivating narrative of Pixar's history, "Creativity, Inc." imparts valuable leadership lessons applicable to any industry or creative pursuit. Whether you're a business leader, artist, or aspiring innovator, this book serves as an inspirational and enlightening guide on the path to unleashing and sustaining creativity in the face of challenges. (Creativity Inc Summary).
Creativity Inc Quotes
"You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”
"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.” (Meaning)
"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.”
"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.”
"When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.”
"Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”
"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."
"Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t.”
"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.”
"When faced with a challenge, get smarter.”
"The future is not a destination - it is a direction.”
"What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?”
"Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.”
"You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.”
"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 best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
"It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.”
"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.”
"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.”
"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.”
"We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.”
"Quality is the best business plan.”
"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.”
"Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised."
"Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.”
"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.”
"Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.”
"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.”
"We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.”
"THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.”
"If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?” he says. “You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it”
"We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission.”
"In Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it.”
"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.”
"This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”
"Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning.”
"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.”
"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.”
"In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win.”
"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.”
"Uncertainty and change are life's constraints. And that's the fun part.”
"You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, the phrase is ridiculous—something said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden. A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they can’t see. Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. And at least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.”
"Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”
"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.”
"There’s something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear.”
"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.”
"Isn’t enough to pick a path—you must go down it.”
"For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.”
"when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to let it evolve, it could be destroyed.”
"When it come to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.”
"Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly.”
"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.”
"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.”
"If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.”
"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.”
"I’m a firm believer in the chaotic nature of the creative process needing to be chaotic. If we put too much structure on it, we will kill it. So there’s a fine balance between providing some structure and safety—financial and emotional—but also letting it get messy and stay messy for a while. To do that, you need to assess each situation to see what’s called for. And then you need to become what’s called for.”
"Good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.”
"We are meaning-making creatures who read other people’s subtle clues just as they read ours.”
"Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out.”
"When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.”
"Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.”
"Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.”
"I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth.”
"Gathered for a two-day off-site in a rustic cabin, 50 miles north of San Francisco, that often functions as our unofficial retreat center. The place, called the Poet’s Loft, is all redwood and glass—perched on stilts over Tomales Bay, a perfect place to think.”
"Here are the qualifications required: 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.”
"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.”
"IN THINKING ABOUT this chapter and about the limits of our perception, a familiar, oft-repeated phrase kept popping into my head: “Hindsight is 20–20.” When we hear it, we normally just nod in agreement—yes, of course—accepting that we can look back on what happened, see it with total clarity, learn from it, and draw the right conclusions. The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20–20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.”
"Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.”
"At the U of U, we were inventing a new language. One of us would contribute a verb, another a noun, then a third person would figure out ways to string the elements together to actually say something.”
"If you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”
"Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.”
"That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information.”
"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.”
"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. The”
"Andrew Stanton spoke next. Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can.”
"Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.”
"Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.”
"And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.)”
"Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided."
"Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.”
"Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking.”
"There is an alternative approach to being wrong as fast as you can. It is the notion that if you carefully think everything through, if you are meticulous and plan well and consider all possible outcomes, you are more likely to create a lasting product. 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."
"While I think the reasons for postmortems are compelling, I know that most people still resist them. So I want to share some techniques that can help managers get the most out of them. First of all, vary the way you conduct them. By definition, postmortems are supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to uncover the same lessons, which isn’t much help to anyone.”
"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.”
"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.”
"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. The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”
"Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing. This problem is not caused by hierarchy itself but by individual or cultural delusions associated with hierarchy, chiefly those that assign personal worth based on rank. By not thinking about how and why we value people, we can fall into this trap almost by default.”
"Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised.”
"Failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy—trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it—dooms you to fail. As Andrew puts it, “Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.” Rejecting”
"Fear of change—innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason—is a powerful force. In many ways, it reminded me of Musical Chairs: We cling as long as possible to the perceived “safe” place that we already know, refusing to loosen our grip until we feel sure another safe place awaits.”
"Ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.”
"Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.”
"Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).”
"What’s needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar.”
"As challenging as that problem proved to be, it paled in comparison to the bigger, and eternal, impediment to our progress: the human resistance to change.”
"There’s something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.”
"How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up?”
― Quotes from the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull
Creativity Inc Author
Ed Catmull is a visionary computer scientist, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, and former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Throughout his illustrious career, Catmull has been at the forefront of computer graphics and animation technology, leading groundbreaking advancements in the film industry. Under his leadership, Pixar became synonymous with innovation and storytelling excellence, producing a string of beloved and critically acclaimed animated films. Catmull's management philosophy, as detailed in his book "Creativity, Inc.," revolves around fostering a creative and collaborative environment that empowers artists and filmmakers to take risks and express their ideas freely. He highlights the importance of candid communication and embracing failure as a natural part of the creative process. By instilling a culture of continuous improvement and learning, Ed Catmull has not only revolutionized animation but also set a standard for creative organizations worldwide, inspiring them to nurture talent and unleash their creative potential.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
