Robi

Lessons from Creativity, Inc.

  1. Study the endgame: Steve Jobs saw the potential behind Pixar. Jobs recognized that Toy Story would be Michael Eisner’s–Disney's CEO at the time–biggest headache as it would emerge as a viable competitor to Disney. To avoid creating an enemy, Eisner would try to keep Pixar as a partner. This gave Steve Jobs a competitive edge, as he would be able to negotiate better terms. This is exactly what he did, asking for a 50/50 split on returns. But in order to satisfy these terms, Pixar would need provide half of the production budgets. In other words, they needed a lot of capital. Jobs managed to do this by taking Pixar public.

  2. You're only as good as your process: Brad Bird, who joined Pixar as director in 2000 would say "the process either makes you or unmakes you." Don't think of the process as something that happens to you because you also have an active role to play in it as well. Katherine Sarafian, a producer who's been at Pixar since Toy Story would say it's more about triggering the process over trusting it.

  3. Candid feedback is rare: Candor means forthrightness or frankness and is not so different from honesty. In common usage, the word communicates not just having the ability to tell the truth but also having a lack of reserve. That is, not holding anything back. The directors at Pixar use a term called "good notes" to provide constructive criticism. It is built on the idea that while telling the truth hurts, no one else will do it so better say it out first before your work suffers for it. It is the idea that candid feedback is rare and valuable.

  4. Fail fast, fail better: Pixar takes risks. It makes movies about rats preparing food and makes a movie about a robot with its first 39 minutes free of dialogue. Creativity begins when you are able to take in feedback and rework an idea over and over and over again. All you need is to stick with your problems so you don't get discouraged every time your idea fails.

  5. Kill your darlings: Problems arise when you identify too closely with your ideas. You become offended when the ideas are challenged. To avoid this trap, you neet a healthy feedback system that removes power dynamics from the equation. Enable yourself to focus on the problem, not the person. In the end, it is your work and not. you who suffers when you become too attached to your ideas.

  6. Start now: people who spend too much of their time planning take longer to meet their goals. Things inevitably go awry and end up investing too much of their emotions which leaves them unmotivated and crushed.

  7. Ed Catmull has a penchant for randomness: This is a weird one, but a large part of the book is focused on how randonmness is part of the folklore of history and literature. The problem, Catmull says, is that our brains aren't built to think about it. Real patterns are woven in with random events so being able to tell the difference between chance and skill is extremely hard. Mental models can help overcome our wiring for simplicity, and to help us become aware that not everything is as simple as it looks. It takes real guts to look at the unknown instead of shunning it, and the unknown can be a source of inspiration and originality. Catmull talks about "stochastic self-similarity" as a tool to understand randomness. Stochastic means random or chance and self-similarity describes the phenomenon. These are events that range from seismic activity to rainfall and see if there are any patterns behind it.

  8. Inversion is the way: Companies like individuals don't become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren't exceptional. In other words, don't flex. Pixar encourages post-morterms, an event where the filmmaker present to his or her team everything they've learned. It also provides an opportunity to teach others who weren't there and allows people to air any real or perceived grievances so that they don't fester. It's a way of paying it forward.

  9. Get rid of your voice: To advance creativity, we must let go of the inner critic. As Philip Glass once said, "the real issue is not how do you find your voice, but how you get rid of the damn thing." In a podcast about mindfulness, Stanford researcher Kelly McGonigal shares how the brain is an expert at suppressing problems rather than facing them. It gets tricky because people in the study thought they were addressing the problem when in fact they were suppressing it. It illustrates an important point. The brain has a tendency to deflect and ignore. Mindfulness is about being aware of it, and looking at the painful heat source without deflecting. Participants saw and felt it for what it was but quieted their reaction to it, and therefore were able to cope much better.

  10. Excellence is everything: Catmull's parting advice is to persist. To persist through the quagmire of discouragement and despair. To look at the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades and look at the problems they struggled with and how they overcame them. So persist on telling your story, persist on reaching your audience, persist on staying true to your vision. You will make mistakes along the way and your work will never be done. You will continue facing problems, and your job is to uncover them and assess your role in them, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Let go of control, accept risk and trust your colleagues to get the job done. Above all, pay attention to anything that creates fear.

  11. Respect passion, but don't be a slave to it: Steve Job took passion in moderation. His mind was well aware that decisions must never be based on emotions alone. But he also recognized that creativity wasn't linear, that art was not commerce, and that to see everything in terms of dollars and cents was to risk disrupting the thing that set Pixar apart. The balance needs to be between emotion and logic, one pendulum swings to the other and maintaining that balance was key to understanding how Steve Jobs made his decisions. People who interacted with Steve Jobs often mentioned a feeling of reality being distorted in his presence. After listening to Steve, they would feel they would have reached a new level of insight, only to find out later they couldn't reconstruct his reasoning and the insight would evaporate. Steve bended the lines and pushed boundaries. Some see this as visionary. Others see it as antisocial, depending on the impact it yields.

  12. Story is king: anything is possible as long as it doesn't get in the way of the story.