17 Lessons from Creativity Inc.
I'm parsing and expanding on lessons Juvoni Beckford shared as insights from Creativity Inc. - an awesome book by Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar.
1. Story is King
Let nothing — not the technology, not merchandising possibilities — get in the way of authentically telling your story.
2. Trust the Process
Every creative endeavour carries inevitable difficulties. The more you create, the more you risk. The further you are from your comfort zone and well-trodden ground, the greater the likelihood you may eventually make a misstep. Despite all of these things, trust the process.
3. Earn Excellence and Quality
Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed to us by others, not proclaimed by ourselves.
4. Balance over Stability
Don't accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability. Balance is an active process - it requires keen senses and continual tension. Stability is passive - you're only truly motionless when you're dead.
5. Strive towards a great product, don't over-focus on the process
Don't confuse the process with the goal. Working on your processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something that you should continually work on – but it is not the goal. Making a product great is the goal.
6. Trust in people
Trust doesn't mean that you trust someone won't screw up – it means you trust them even when they do screw up.
7. Constraints can lead to creativity
Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances.
8. Surround yourself with smart 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.
9. Emotions tell the story
Most people think of animation as the characters just moving around in funny ways while they deliver their lines, but great animators carefully craft the movements that elicit an emotional response, convincing us that these characters have feelings, emotions, intentions.
10. Learning to draw is learning to see
A trained artist who sees a chair, then, can capture what the eye perceives (shape, color) before their ”recogniser“ function tells them what it is supposed to be. They see more because they've learned how to turn off their mind's tendency to jump to conclusions. There's a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. They are about learning to see.
11. Be Open to wonder like a child
In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, ‘not known mind'. To have a ”not known mind“ is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called ”beginner's mind".
12. Learn about a problem quickly, Act
People who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The over-planners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed).
13. Allow room for Creativity
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.
14. Build the capacity for change
Change and uncertainty are a part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capacity to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don't always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will always be ill prepared to lead.
15. Failure isn't evil
Failure isn't a necessary evil. It isn't evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
16. Seek to understand first
If someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Your first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions.
17. Gratitude is priceless
While everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the eye by someone they respect and told, ”Thank you.“ At Pixar, they devised a way to give employees money and gratitude. When a movie makes enough money to trigger bonuses, the executives, directors and producers personally distribute checks to every person who worked on the film.
