Top 70 Ed Catmull Quotes (2024 Update)

2. “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

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. “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

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Ed Catmull

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Ed Catmull

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Ed Catmull

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Ed Catmull

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

— Ed Catmull

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

— Ed Catmull

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

— Ed Catmull

23. “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. The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”

— Ed Catmull

24. “Where, along the way, do we turn from the wide-eyed child into the adult who fears surprises and has all the answers and seeks to control all outcomes?”

— 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. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Ed Catmull

30. “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

31. “That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information.”

— Ed Catmull

32. “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

33. “The first principle was “Story Is King,” by which we meant that we would let nothing – not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities – get in the way of our story.”

— Ed Catmull

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

— Ed Catmull

35. “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

36. “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

37. “We are meaning-making creatures.”

— Ed Catmull

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

— Ed Catmull

39. “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

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

— Ed Catmull

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

— Ed Catmull

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

— Ed Catmull

48. “Fear of change – innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason – is a powerful force.”

— Ed Catmull

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

— Ed Catmull

50. “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