Top 70 Ed Catmull Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.”

— Ed Catmull

2. “You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation – you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.”

— Ed Catmull

3. “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

4. “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

— Ed Catmull

5. “Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.”

— Ed Catmull

6. “Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.”

— Ed Catmull

7. “I’m a firm believer in the chaotic nature of the creative process needing to be chaotic. If we put too much structure on it, we will kill it. So there’s a fine balance between providing some structure and safety – financial and emotional – but also letting it get messy and stay messy for a while. To do that, you need to assess each situation to see what’s called for. And then you need to become what’s called for.”

— Ed Catmull

8. “If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of ourselves, support healthy habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling lives outside of work. Moreover, everyone’s home lives change as they – and their children, if they have them – age.”

— Ed Catmull

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.”

— Ed Catmull

12. “Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.”

— Ed Catmull

13. “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

— Ed Catmull

14. “When faced with a challenge, get smarter.”

— Ed Catmull

15. “As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization – be it an animation studio or a record label – is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. 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 and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow.”

— Ed Catmull

16. “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

17. “When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.”

— Ed Catmull

18. “Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.”

— Ed Catmull

19. “If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?”

— Ed Catmull

20. “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

21. “THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.”

— Ed Catmull

22. “The story of Cassandra is traditionally taken as a parable about what happens when valid warnings are ignored. But for me, it raises different issues. Why, I always wonder, do we think of Cassandra as the one who’s cursed? The real curse, it seems to me, afflicts everyone else – all of those who are unable to perceive the truth she speaks. I.”

— Ed Catmull

23. “Many of the rules that people find onerous and bureaucratic were put in place to deal with real abuses, problems, or inconsistencies or as a way of managing complex environments. But while each rule may have been instituted for good reason, after a while a thicket of rules develops that may not make sense in the aggregate. The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the creative impulse.”

— Ed Catmull

24. “If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?” he says. “You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it.”

— Ed Catmull

25. “Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.”

— Ed Catmull

26. “Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”

— Ed Catmull

27. “We are meaning-making creatures.”

— Ed Catmull

28. “Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason – our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.”

— Ed Catmull

29. “Lo que creo es que la creatividad consiste precisamente en saber trabajar con el cambio.”

— Ed Catmull

30. “You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.”

— Ed Catmull

31. “In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires – they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win.”

— Ed Catmull

32. “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

33. “If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse.”

— Ed Catmull

34. “It isn’t enough to pick a path – you must go down it. By doing so, you see things you couldn’t possibly see when you started out; you may not like what you see, some of it may be confusing, but at least you will have, as we like to say, “explored the neighborhood.” The key point here is that even if you decide you’re in the wrong place, there is still time to head toward the right place.”

— Ed Catmull

35. “Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that 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.”

— Ed Catmull

36. “Frequently, the people in charge of the Beast are the most organized people in the company – people wired to make things happen on track and on budget, as their bosses expect them to do. When those people and their interests become too powerful – when there is not sufficient push-back to protect new ideas – things go wrong. The Beast takes over.”

— Ed Catmull

37. “While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.”

— Ed Catmull

38. “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

39. “We are meaning-making creatures who read other people’s subtle clues just as they read ours.”

— Ed Catmull

40. “Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. 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

41. “Clearly, something in our process had broken – the desire for quality had gone well beyond rationality. But because of the way production unfolded, our people had to work on scenes without knowing the context for them – so they overbuilt them just to be safe.”

— Ed Catmull

42. “We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.”

— Ed Catmull

43. “While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.”

— Ed Catmull

44. “There’s something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear.”

— Ed Catmull

45. “Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply.”

— Ed Catmull

46. “But as challenging as that problem proved to be, it paled in comparison to the bigger, and eternal, impediment to our progress: the human resistance to change.”

— Ed Catmull

47. “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. If there is fear, there is a reason – our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.”

— Ed Catmull

48. “But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That’s not a weakness or a flaw. That’s reality.”

— Ed Catmull

49. “Because your rational mind knows that tunnels have two ends, your emotional mind can be kept in check when pitch blackness descends in the confusing middle. Instead of collapsing into a nervous mess, the director who has a clear internal model of what creativity is – and the discomfort it requires – finds it easier to trust that light will shine again. The key is to never stop moving forward.”

— Ed Catmull

50. “Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.”

— Ed Catmull