A trained artist who sees a chair, then, is able to capture what the eye perceives (shape, color) before their recognizer function tells them what it is supposed to be.
A management team brought in by George to restructure Lucasfilm seemed concerned mostly with cash flow, and as time went on, they became openly skeptical that our division would ever attract a buyer....
A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces,
When our younger employees—those without families—work longer hours than those who are parents, we must be mindful not to compare the output of these two groups without being mindful of the context. I...
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...
In Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called beginner’s mind. And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it.
You suffer through it as you struggle to solve it, but by the end you’ve developed a sort of fondness for it, and you miss it when it is gone.
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 you are candid, you are telling people that you trust them and that there is nothing to fear. To confide in employees is to give them a sense of ownership over the information.
When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work—even when it is confounding them.
What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems,
We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission.
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 need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that...
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...
Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.
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...
To reiterate, it is the focus on people—their work habits, their talents, their values—that is absolutely central to any creative venture.