If every CEO were as insightful as Ed Catmull, this aligned with the creative process and interested in how creative people work, The American Corporate-Industrial Complex (and American commercial media) would be a more interesting place (for what that’s worth—I still wish Brave had been better).
We’ve got these successful things going on and we mis-perceive how we got there. Or who the influences are. And we draw these wrong ideas and we then make a series of mistakes which are not well grounded in reality. Which means the things that are happening now that are wrong at Pixar are already happening and I can’t see them. And I have to start with that premise. And through all the history… there is something going on here and I don’t know what it is.”
If I look at the range, you’ve got one [constraint] that is art school, I’m doing this for arts sake, Ratatouille and WALL-E clearly fall more on that side, the other is the purely commercial side, where you’ve got a lot of films that are made purely for following a trend, if you go entirely for the art side then eventually you fail economically. if you go purely commercially then I think you fail from a soul point of view… we’ve got these elements pulling on both sides, the art side and the commercial side… and the the trick is not to let one side win. That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And I just want to stay right there in the middle.
Catmull was interviewed by The Economist. Full interview can be found here.
The excerpts above were transcribed by Scott Berkun, who in his own short speech at the same conference said something that applies to artists as much as it does to tech entrepreneurs: it’s more about work than inspiration. I have always thought of my own pursuit in terms of a wager (a wager I don’t always feel I’m winning or can keep believing in, honestly), a bet on my ability to achieve what started as an insight and a desire, a sense of being marked for a particular work. Keeping faith with that image, staying fully committed to your own ideas about yourself—that can be the harder work by far.
Next, we need to get past our obsession with epiphany. You won’t find any flash of insight in history that wasn’t followed, or proceeded, by years of hard work. Ideas are easy. They are cheap. Any creativity book or course will help you find more ideas. What’s rare is the willingness to bet you reputation, career, or finances on your ideas. To commit fully to pursuing them. Ideas are abstractions. Executing and manifesting an idea in the world is something else entirely as there are constraints, political, financial, and technical that the ideas we keep locked up in our minds never have to wrestle with. And this distinction is something no theory or book or degree can ever grant you. Conviction, like trust and willingness to take risks, is exceptionally rare. Part of the reason so much of innovation is driven by entrepreneurs and independents is that they are fully committed to their own ideas in ways most working people, including executives, are not.