Top 100 Catmull Quotes
#1. Ed Catmull has thought a lot about the role luck plays at a great company, and how businesspeople manage that luck. It's all in the preparedness, he says, and in creating a culture that can adapt to the unexpected. "These things are always going to happen. What separates you is your response,
Brent Schlender
#2. Pixar's Ed Catmull likes to say that since you can't control the luck itself, which is bound to come your way for better and for worse, what matters is your state of preparedness to deal with it.
Brent Schlender
#3. But the truth is, at some point, our films - almost every single one of them - are really bad. And it's largely hats off to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull who have set up a system whereby they're expecting it.
Pete Docter
#4. But when you find your soul, you have to go. When you find your true shape, when the wind lifts you up, when you remember who you are, you have to go.
Katherine Catmull
#5. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future.
Ed Catmull
#6. In general, I have found that 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 overplanners just take longer to be wrong
Ed Catmull
#7. In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules, so long as those rules work.
Ed Catmull
#8. We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions.
Ed Catmull
#9. It's extremely difficult to create something out of nothing, especially when you consider that much of what you're trying to realize is hidden, at least at first.
Ed Catmull
#10. Our mental models aren't reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. But, as we know all too well, sometimes the forecast says rain and, boom, the sun comes out. The tool is not reality. The key is knowing the difference.
Ed Catmull
#11. It'll be a day in which you tell us how to make Pixar better," John said. "We'll do no work that day. No visitors will be allowed. Everyone must attend.
Ed Catmull
#12. Her grief was like the evening sun behind the trees when you ride your bicycle west: sometimes you get a glimpse between the branches, or you hit a bump in the road, and the sudden blaze of sun in your eyes hurts so much, it blinds you. But mostly you're just riding quietly along in the dusk. She
Katherine Catmull
#13. She wasn't a cruel Bird. But her heart ached so badly for these sad, broken birds that, just as the Puppeteer had planned, she had begun to hate them. She hated them for making her feel so wretched, when she should be happiest. That happens sometimes.
Katherine Catmull
#14. the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones.
Ed Catmull
#15. When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what's bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.
Ed Catmull
#16. You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
Edwin Catmull
#17. Fear of change - innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason - is a powerful force.
Ed Catmull
#18. A map is a song. It's different when different people sing it ... You will make this your own song, sing it your own way.
Katherine Catmull
#19. I believe that no creative company should ever stop evolving, and this would be our latest attempt to avoid stagnation.
Ed Catmull
#20. We are striving to tell you something impactful and true. When attempting to make good on that promise, no detail is too small.
Ed Catmull
#21. Fear can be created quickly; trust can't.
Ed Catmull
#22. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised.
Ed Catmull
#23. Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response.
Ed Catmull
#24. We never really know what might be beside us or ahead, bust most days we walk as if we do.
(from uncorrected galley)
Katherine Catmull
#25. He told me that he thinks he and the other proven directors have a responsibility to be teachers - that this should be a central part of their jobs, even as they continue to make their own films.
Ed Catmull
#26. We have friends in every woods we walk through, though we walk through them not knowing.
Katherine Catmull
#27. That's because success convinces us that we are doing things the right way. There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.
Ed Catmull
#28. Her voice was warm and husky as a clarinet, but not so sad as a clarinet: friendlier. When she laughed, it was like a clarinet blowing bubbles.
Katherine Catmull
#29. I love solving the problems of having groups work together and removing barriers. But to actually turn around and be in the center of that is an awkward place to be.
Edwin Catmull
#30. constructive criticism is "good notes." A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn't clear, what makes no sense.
Ed Catmull
#31. The bird music sank into her, like a song you used to know but forgot long ago. You hear a piano play it some day, and for a minute you feel a happy pain, but you don't know why. Bird felt like that.
Katherine Catmull
#32. As more people are added to any group, there is an inexorable drift toward inflexibility.
Ed Catmull
#33. fail early and fail fast" and "be wrong as fast as you can.
Ed Catmull
#34. The uncreated is a vast, empty space. This emptiness is so scary that most hold on to what they know, making minor adjustments to what they understand, unable to move on to something unknown.
Ed Catmull
#35. studios down. (He also thought, frankly, that making us the stewards of both entities would guarantee that Pixar's traditions didn't get overtaken by those of the much larger corporation, the Walt Disney Company.)
Ed Catmull
#36. This sounds simple enough - honor the viewpoints of others! -
Ed Catmull
#37. good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they're in.
Ed Catmull
#38. Seeing is 'making,' whether you see with your mind or your true self. Try to see with your self, your self and your beast together, and not your busy, frightened mind.
Katherine Catmull
#39. We never really know what might me beside us or ahead, but most days we walk as if we do
Katherine Catmull
#40. In dreams and in making, you choose what you are. But you do not choose only once. Over and over, at every turning you must choose. This felt like a turning, a time to choose what she was.
Katherine Catmull
#41. That is what I love best about dreams, and about makings, good makings. They are folded-up buds of complications and mysteries, and if you stay with them patiently, they will unfold and unfold, and never stop unfolding. Dreams are flowers that never stop blooming.
Katherine Catmull
#43. The roller coaster came to a stop and a good friend got off, but what a ride we'd taken together. It had been one hell of a trip.
Ed Catmull
#44. 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.
Ed Catmull
#45. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear.
Ed Catmull
#46. Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.
Ed Catmull
#47. If everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up.
Edwin Catmull
#48. The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world. Fear and trust are powerful forces, and while they are not opposites, exactly, trust is the best tool for driving out fear.
Ed Catmull
#49. If one looks at creativity as a resource that we continually draw upon to make something from nothing, then our fear stems from the need to make the nonexistent come into being.
Ed Catmull
#50. good managers - don't dictate from on high. They reach out, they listen, they wrangle, coax, and cajole.
Ed Catmull
#51. Sometimes you talk about the problems in fifty different ways until you find that one sentence that you can see makes their eyes pop, as if they're thinking, 'Oh, I want to do it.
Ed Catmull
#52. He saw firsthand the way that the Disney people took advantage of the open floor plan, sharing information and brainstorming. Steve was a big believer in the power of accidental mingling; he knew that creativity was not a solitary endeavor.
Ed Catmull
#53. Don't wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It'll be pretty when we get there, but it won't be pretty along the way.
Ed Catmull
#54. Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can't be avoided, and "vision" is often an illusion.
Ed Catmull
#55. Well, I don't care," said Bird out loud, said Bird, who cared so much that she couldn't bear to touch the hurt. "I don't care. I ran away from Summer, and I will make my own castle. I will be my own queen.
Katherine Catmull
#56. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior.
Ed Catmull
#57. Trust doesn't mean that you trust that someone won't screw up - it means you trust them even when they do screw up.
Ed Catmull
#58. 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 bugging them, for the fear of being labeled complainers.
Ed Catmull
#59. but its most important characteristic was an ability to analyze the emotional beats of a movie without any of its members themselves getting emotional or defensive.
Ed Catmull
#60. Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.
Ed Catmull
#61. Countless times, I remember watching him toss ideas - pretty far-out ideas - into the air, just to see how they played. And if they didn't play well, he would move on.
Ed Catmull
#62. And I love everything on this changing, burning earth, but I am most grateful to you.
Katherine Catmull
#63. I feel like the only reason we're able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, 'discovery' means you don't know the answer when you start.
Ed Catmull
#64. When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
Ed Catmull
#65. we didn't know what was impossible. Neither, apparently, did he: He was among the first to believe that Hollywood movie execs would care a fig about what was happening in academia.
Ed Catmull
#66. The trick is to shift the emphasis in any meeting away from the source of an idea and onto the idea itself.
Ed Catmull
#67. 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.
Ed Catmull
#68. If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
Edwin Catmull
#70. I'm not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth.
Ed Catmull
#71. The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure - to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn't strike terror into your employees' hearts.
Ed Catmull
#72. You don't have to ask permission to take responsibility.
Ed Catmull
#73. She knew what it meant to want to return to safety and seed-husk again. But you cannot get back into your seed-husk, once it is cracked open and no longer yours.
Katherine Catmull
#74. Uncertainty and change are life's constraints. And that's the fun part.
Ed Catmull
#76. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea - that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge.
Ed Catmull
#77. great animators carefully craft the movements that elicit an emotional response, convincing us that these characters have feelings, emotions, intentions.
Ed Catmull
#79. That's the place you're looking for: when the movie starts to tell you what it wants to be.
Ed Catmull
#80. Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.
Ed Catmull
#81. You might say I'm an advocate for humility in leaders. But to be truly humble, those leaders must first understand how many of the factors that shape their lives and businesses are - and will always be - out of sight.
Ed Catmull
#82. It's pretty popular today to say that everybody should learn to fail and that failure's a good thing. Intellectually, it's an obvious thing. But in fact, it gets conflated with another meaning of failure, so when we grow up as kids, failing in school was a really bad thing.
Edwin Catmull
#83. You don't drown because you can't breathe. You drown because you try to breathe what is not breathable.
Katherine Catmull
#84. (This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.) Whether
Ed Catmull
#85. Most of us walk around thinking that our view is best - probably because it is the only one we really know.
Ed Catmull
#86. there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. And
Ed Catmull
#87. Things change, constantly, as they should. And with change comes the need for adaptation, for fresh thinking, and, sometimes, for even a total reboot - of your project, your department, your division, or your company as a whole.
Ed Catmull
#88. As I've said, ARPA had been created in response to Sputnik, and one of its key organizing principles was that collaboration could lead to excellence.
Ed Catmull
#89. communicating fully and openly, by not withholding or misleading. There is no doubt that our decision-making is better if we are able to draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group. But as valuable as the information is
Ed Catmull
#90. For me, creativity includes problem-solving. That's the broad definition of it.
Edwin Catmull
#91. If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it. Or they'll throw it away and come up with something else.
Edwin Catmull
#92. Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people's intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them.
Ed Catmull
#94. Don't confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on - but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.
Ed Catmull
#95. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.
Ed Catmull
#96. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.
Ed Catmull
#97. Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.
Ed Catmull
#98. I actually feel awkward being at the center of attention.
Edwin Catmull
#99. We tend to think of emotion and logic as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains. Not Steve. From the beginning, when making decisions, passion was a key part of his calculus.
Ed Catmull
#100. We had done the impossible. We had done the thing that everyone told us we couldn't do. And we had done it spectacularly well.
Ed Catmull
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