Lessons from Pixar 2: Failure Is an Ingredient for Creativity | by Ameet Ranadive | Great Business Stories | Medium

In Part 2 of my “Lessons from Pixar” series, I wanted to share the take-away around how failure is a key ingredient for creativity. As I mentioned in Part 1, I recently read Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull, a book about the formation and growth of Pixar. Ed devotes a whole chapter of his book to the discussion of “Fear and Failure.” Those of us who have been part of startups as well as innovative larger companies are familiar with the refrain, “Fail early and often.” This quote has become kind of a tagline for doing a startup. What does it actually mean, and why is it important to the act of creation? Ed writes about how many people go out of their way to avoid failure. We have all felt the embarrassment, the pain, and sometimes the hit to our self-esteem when we fail. No question that failure is uncomfortable and sometimes pretty painful. Some people will chalk mistakes and failure up as a “necessarily evil” on the path towards creation. But Ed takes a different view: “Mistakes aren’t a

In Part 2 of my “Lessons from Pixar” series, I wanted to share the take-away around how failure is a key ingredient for creativity. As I mentioned in Part 1, I recently read Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull, a book about the formation and growth of Pixar. Ed devotes a whole chapter of his book to the discussion of “Fear and Failure.” Those of us who have been part of startups as well as innovative larger companies are familiar with the refrain, “Fail early and often.” This quote has become kind of a tagline for doing a startup. What does it actually mean, and why is it important to the act of cre