That’s the place you’re looking for: when the movie starts to tell you what it wants to be.
People want to hang on to things that work—stories that work, methods that work, strategies that work. You figure something out, it works, so you keep doing it—this is what an organization that is com...
One of the first people I interviewed was Alvy Ray Smith, a charismatic Texan with a Ph.D. in computer science and a sparkling resume that included teaching stints at New York University and UC Berkel...
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. I
I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am.
I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult.
Creativity involves missteps and imperfections.
A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.
When you begin to grasp that big and little problems are structured similarly, then that helps you maintain a calmer perspective. Moreover, it helps you remain open to an important reality: If all our...
Easy isn’t the goal. Quality is the goal.
Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that...
When filmmakers, industrial designers, software designers, or people in any other creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it givers the illusion of creativity, but it is...
We frequently support the idea of pushing boundaries in theory, ignoring the trouble it can cause in practice.
The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realised that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what's bugg...
The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.
The Sword of Damocles, after the Greek myth,
That Takes You Inside the Mind), 94–99, 178 Internet,
Sometimes a big event happens that changes everything. When it does, it tends to affirm the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones. That’s a problem, inside co...
Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can’t be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can’t completely grasp it...
People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up,