1+1: Embrace the chaos of creativity + The War of Art

Here's one leadership idea and one resource I’ve found beneficial in the past two weeks:

1 idea: Embrace the chaos of creativity

What’s the secret behind Pixar’s commercial and cultural success? As Pixar CEO Ed Catmull documents in his book Creativity, Inc., it’s a creative process that allows room for mistakes and re-do’s.

Take one of the films from writer and director Pete Docter. In the early drafts of this film, two princes live in a castle in the sky. The boys are polar opposites, and they fight incessantly over who will inherit their dad's kingdom. One day, they fall from the sky and land on Earth. As they search for a way back up to their hidden kingdom in the clouds, they encounter a mysteriously tall bird who helps them understand each other for the first time.

Can you guess which film this is?

After many revisions, this concept would eventually become Up—a movie that bears little resemblance to its early drafts. Instead of focusing on two boys, the story follows an old man named Carl. Rather than a kingdom in the clouds, Carl ties hundreds of balloons to his home and floats into the sky. Indeed, the only two elements from the original storyline that remained were the tall bird and the movie title. The blimp is not camouflaged as a cloud. No magical eggs grant eternal youth to the consumer. If this film were a human, it would look nothing like its baby pictures. And yet, this much-revised movie would go on to win multiple Oscars and Golden Globes.

As Catmull reflects on his decades of leading this wildly successful creative enterprise, he argues that messiness is inevitably part of the process:

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it's often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films "ugly babies." They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing—in the form of time and patience—in order to grow….Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly.

Any good artist will tell you about the necessity of suspending judgment early on in a creative process. Our fear of failure often leads us to swoop in and kill these fledgling ideas before they can take full form. We look at these runts and imagine that they will grow into malformed adults, and we want to put them out of their misery now. But the truth is, these larval-stage concepts will likely evolve into whole other species if nourished appropriately.  

It took Lin-Manuel Miranda seven years to write Hamilton. Frank Herbert spent six years writing Dune, then was rejected by 23 publishers. Each of these famous works of art began with ill-formed ideas that were recast many times over the years. If these great artists had to labor over their work, what makes you think you can get it right on the first try?

Don’t compare your ugly, early work to the final, polished version of someone else’s. Every beautiful work has an ugly beginning. You might just be in the midst of yours right now. So in the meantime, embrace the chaos of creativity.

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• What personal or professional projects require your creativity right now?

• What could an ugly first draft of those projects look like?

• What guardrails could you erect to protect it from judgment until it finds its way?

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1 resource: The War of Art

Despite writing multiple bestsellers, Stephen Pressfield still has to fight to produce good art. As he ably articulates in The War of Art, this internal battle is endemic to all artists. Producing anything original is a war—but a war you can win.

PS: How to play a flute with one note...