A fair amount of feedback had focused on John himself, and not all of it was positive. In
Real
Pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions. When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn’t...
One of the pioneers of interactive computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland.
Listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems. In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your st...
Leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.
Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I’m not just talking about seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who admire and look up to us...
When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every facet of every problem if we just try hard enough. But that’s a fallacy. The better approach, I...
We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that the process has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more r...
We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.
We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.
Two days a month, he allowed his engineers to work on anything they wanted, using Pixar’s resources to engage with whatever problem or question they found interesting. It didn’t have to be directly ap...
To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny a...
This tension between the individual’s personal creative contribution and the leverage of the group is a dynamic that exists in all creative environments, but this would be my first taste of it.
This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
This is not a call for working faster or doing more overtime or making do with fewer people, he said in one town hall forum.
The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event th...
The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
The first principle was Story Is King, by which we meant that we would let nothing—not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—get in the way of our story.
The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal—it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.