Aphorisms on Creativity from Pixar
Pixar Studios has for many years produced excellent, highly successful creative work. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Pixar President Ed Catmull offers some insight into how.
Adaptive Path’s weekly "signposts" post pointed me to a Harvard Business Review article written by Pixar president Ed Catmull about creativity. And boy howdy, it is a gem. Below, I quote it often and at length, not (solely) because I am lazy, but because paraphrasing it would be a violent disservice to its pithy creative insight.
Its principle thesis is that there is a common and crucial misunderstanding about the nature of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And while this idea perhaps simply recapitulates the famous Edisonian encomium to work, it does so with some pretty damn compelling market proof: Pixar studios.
I will now begin to simply pull just a few particularly poignant aphorisms from Catmull’s rather lengthy article. Again, if these Twitter-sized morsels are enjoyable in their own right, the article itself is a feast, and recommended.
- Creativity is like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything.
- If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people!
- Having two different standards of quality in the same studio [is] bad for our souls
- If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.
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