But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them - if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line - well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work - things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. Moreover, you cannot plan your way of problems. While planning is very important, and we do a lot of it, there is only so much you can control in a creative environment. 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.
But just because “failure free” is crucial in some industries does not mean that it should be a goal in all of them. When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.
To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things - in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.
Let us return, for a moment, to the metaphor I used earlier in this chapter, that of the door. On one side is everything we see and know - the world as we understand it. On the other side is everything we can’t see and don’t know - unsolved problems, unexpressed emotions, unrealized possibilities so innumerable that imagining them is inconceivable. This side, then, is not an alternate reality but something even harder to fathom: that which has not yet been created.
The goal is to place one foot on either side of the door - one grounded in what we know, what we are confident about, our areas of expertise, the people and processes we can count on - and the other in the unknown, where things are murky, unseen, or uncreated.
Many fear this side of the door. We crave stability and uncertainty, so we keep both feet rooted in what we know, believing that if we repeat ourselves or repeat what is known to work, we will be safe. This feels like a rational view. Just as we know that the rule of law leads to healthier, more productive societies or that practice makes perfect or that the planets orbit the sun, we all need things that we can count on. But no matter how intensely we desire certainty, we should understand that whether because of our limits or randomness or future unknowable confluences of events, something will inevitably come, unbidden, through that door. Some of it will be uplifting and inspiring, and some of it will be disastrous.
We all know people who eagerly face the unknown; they engage with the seemingly intractable problems of science, engineering, and society; they embrace the complexities of visual or written expression; they are invigorated by uncertainty. That’s because they believe that, through questioning, they can do more than merely look through the door. They can venture across its threshold.
There are others who venture into the unknown with surprising success but with little understanding of what they have done. Believing in their cleverness, they revel in their brilliance, telling others about the importance of taking risks. But having stumbled into greatness once, they are not eager for another trip into the unknown. That’s because success makes them warier than ever of failure, so they retreat, content to repeat what they have done before. They stay on the side of the known.
As I discuss the elements of a healthy creative environment, you may have noticed that I have expressly not sought out to define the word creativity - and that’s intentional. I don’t do it because it doesn’t seem useful. I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers - the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without our knowing it. The issue of what is hidden, then, is not just an abstraction to be bandied about as an intellectual exercise. The Hidden - and our acknowledgement of it - is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier, but they can help us uncover hidden problems and, thus, enable us to address them. It is to this we now turn in earnest.
Creativity equals connecting previous unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.
You have to have them to correct them. Creative people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of experiences? Not by traveling the same path as everyone else.
And yet I’ve watched people at Pixar making these films, and they work as hard as I’ve seen anybody in a technology company ever work. The creative process is as disciplined as any engineering process I’ve seen in my life. And they’re as passionate about it as any technical person I’ve ever seen.
On the other hand, the content companies have no appreciation of the creative process in the technical companies. They think that technology is something that you write a check for and buy. That’s it. And they do not understand that there’s a wide, dynamic range of capability and elegance. They don’t understand the creativity in the process.
Once our hunger for basic knowledge and entertainment is satisfied, we become more discriminating about exactly what knowledge and entertainment we want, and in the process learn more about ourselves and what drives us. This ultimately turns many of us from passive consumers to active producers, motivated by the psychic rewards of creating.
Not all people, no matter how creative, function well in an environment with minimal structure. Some people don’t know how to channel their energy into productive tasks with measurable outcomes. Other people crave — and excel under — close and specific direction.
Creative types can often be characterized as follows:
- They appear to have little regard for authority, rules, structure, and routine, viewing these as elements of the work world that do not apply to them.
- They establish surroundings within their work environments that support and feed their imaginations.
- They have unorthodox or eccentric methods for stimulating their productivity.
- They appear disorganized and seem to “fly by the seat of their pants” when giving presentations.
- They find humor in, and even make fun of, just about everything.
- They work in spurts of intensity that can last for hours, days, or even weeks, then go into a “down” phase, when they appear to accomplish very little.
- They arrive late or even fail to show up for staff or other general meetings that don’t apply directly to their projects.
Despite appearances to the contrary, most creative people are highly organized. It’s just that the organization doesn’t necessarily take the form of neatly labeled files and calendars that record meetings and commitments — the standard trappings of structure. Those “seat of the pants” presentations often reflect not lack of preparation but instead a deeply assimilated knowledge of the topic acquired through intense and often extended research or observation — sometimes with a dash of intuition thrown in. This less tangible style of organization can have the appearances of chaos, but it’s not. For the creative individual, it’s as close to logical as it gets.
Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.
When I started working on a subject I would always worry that there would be no jokes on it. The way to overcome this was to focus on my belief that jokes are not genius thunderbolts, they already exist in the ether, and all I had to do was keep looking for them.
The second pattern I noticed was that around 3pm on the afternoon of the recording I would truly believe with all my heart that I’d written was utter rubbish that I was going to fail. A younger me would have gone into panic mode but I learnt to realize it was a mid-afternoon slump, to put the feelings to one side and keep working.
Basically the answer to all my problems was always to keep working, to keep sifting through ideas, to keep looking for that other angle or meaning or context.
This brought me to my third discovery: no matter how much I thought I’d run out of ideas on a subject, if left it by taking a break or visiting another subject, when I returned to it my brain would have new ideas. I started to think of this as background processing.
His success has begun to limit his creativity.
In hindsight now I can see that success pushes you into some sort of formal way of thinking even within your own creative space. You become more square. But as time goes, there is less and less space on that canvas. So you need to create a new one.