The Wisdom Wall
12 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“Now, ah, it was to replace what Tom Schumacher was doing. It didn't work. The problem was, they weren't outside. They're in the building, they're all the time, and they're always know what's going on. Ah, so the notion of them being on the outside isn't, isn't true. However, what we discovered was they had this immense…”
“There's another reason why you didn't go to the brain trust meetings, is that in order to get the dynamics right, that the people with power, either real or perceived power, need to shut the hell up for the first 10 to 15 minutes. David Senra: And he couldn't do that? Ed Catmull: It wasn't that. Ed Catmull: The, the…”
“So paying attention to the dynamics of those rooms is the job. They're the ones that are making the movies. I'm not making the movie. I'm just trying to make sure they work well together.”
“the one thing that the director can't do, they can screw up in all sorts of ways, but they can't lose the team. That was, that was our guiding line.”
“a mission statement is an answer when typically we should always be asking questions.”
“If somebody violates a rule of common sense, People do once in a while. You call them on the carpet, you tell them you can't do it, but you don't make a rule so that nobody else makes the same mistake. Um, because as soon as you make more rules, then people are worried about what are all these rules? Who do I have to…”
“If things are going well, you like a bigger group because you're training other people to feel comfortable. In this way of working. But the problem is really serious when you go to a small group where they're for past that stuff and they can focus on the problem.”
“if I know that I'm wrong half the time, that I catch it earlier. I special, I spend less time on the wrong decision. So it looks like the ratio is different. The reality is, I'm just wrong half the time. I think it's important to think that way, and that allows you to, to say, ok, maybe this is one of those times, and…”
“asking the question might have been a natural thing, to ask. But trying to answer it is an act of separation. That's the problem with it. Because I'm trying to say, how am I separate from others? And really, I never was. It's like none of this would have happened without a lot of things coming together, and the notion…”
“To some extent, the, uh, the entertainment industry is, is a different kind of competitive landscape. If you've got a movie out in the theaters, then you would actually like all the other films not to be there because you want everybody to come to yours. But if you don't have a film out there, Then you want people to…”
“Well, one of them is the discussion is always about the topic. It isn't about who's right.”
“We also, uh, published everything, uh, and part of this was the realization that the people that we wanted were the people who wanted to be part of the bigger community. At this time, the computer graphics community called SIGGRAPH was just starting, And they wanted to be able to, to publish. So publishing everything…”