Via

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.

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Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
Their lives a mimicry,
Their passions a quotation.
— Oscar Wilde

We all want our clients to be happy. The engagement I was talking about Monday sticks out in my mind because it's the only one in my life where the client wasn't happy.

I have reflected, and I know I had a few things to learn about professionalism (and salesmanship, obviously). But what I felt then, and I still feel now, is that what's going to make everyone really happy is great results.

Now, great isn't easy. It isn't guaranteed. And we all need to eat, so that means we've got to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. But nobody ever got great by playing it safe. Trying to implement new ideas is risky business.

Every time we try to do something great, we gamble our reputations. Sometimes we get fired, and sometimes we have to resign. Maybe someday, somebody will shake their fist and yell, "You'll never work in this town again!" But listen: If we just wanted money, we'd have jobs writing code for Oracle or re-touching photos for Teen People, or as sub-bosses in a 1920s crime syndicate.

"Money, okay, everybody likes money. But somehow it don't seem like him."

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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— "Slammin'" Sam Beckett

This sounds all Zen and profound, but it really depends on how you define success.

Here is an actual situation that happend to us:

Some time back, we were designing some things for a client in a design area that was pretty much totally virgin territory for everyone involved. It was exciting for this reason.

The client and ourselves had a handful of meetings, after which we came up with some proposals, pitched them, and they were accepted. A plan of action was outlined and agreed upon. Talk around the table indicated that since we were in new territory, the best course was to just start pushing through the first couple of passes, and then re-evaluate.

About halfway through the project, Nick and I were up very late drinking bourbon, (attentive readers will notice this is somewhat of a motif) and we had the vaunted "Eureka!" moment. All of a sudden, the project made sense, and we had an actual, real solution right there in our hands.

First, the good news: It was still a real solution the next morning. We spent that day creating a presentation detailing the ways that our new proposal addressed all the concerns that the client had voiced, and flat-out solved the problem from a conceptual standpoint. We pitched it that same afternoon.

Now the bad news: The client felt it was best to continue building the original idea.

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Copyblogger Brian Clark proved once again that he is truly the master of click-inducing post titles with his Sunday post, How to Write Remarkably Creative Content.

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