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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 02f44af | Everyone says they want to hire excellent people, but in truth we don't really know, at first, who will rise up to make a difference. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 237ebb2 | Unlike some theoretical ideas, Occam's Razor accords easily with human nature. In general, we seek what we think are simple explanations for events in our lives because we believe the simpler something is, the more fundamental--the more true--it is. | Ed Catmull | ||
| d44f932 | 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 | ||
| c38365f | The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 615386f | To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line. To create a culture in which this was possible, you needed more than a cord within easy reach. You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first--not just saying that we did, but prov.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| f780c2e | In many ways, the work of a critic is easy," Ego says. "We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. 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. But there are times when a critic tru.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| fee1a40 | Here's what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing. This problem is .. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 8d1d56d | What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, | Ed Catmull | ||
| 213478a | 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 | ||
| 0becb92 | 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 | ||
| 8a0f90a | The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). | Ed Catmull | ||
| 690c541 | The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being. Whether it's a T-Rex or a slinky dog or a desk lamp, if viewers sense not just movement but intention--or, put another way, emotion--then the animator has done his or her job. It's not just lines on paper anymore; it's a living, feeling entity. This is what I experienced that night, for the first time, as I watched Donald leap o.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| f917148 | 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 | ||
| f4ccb04 | I often say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. What does that mean? It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn't. As long as our intentions--our values--remain constant, our goals can shift as needed. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 212a46d | whenever I hear work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f8fd48a | Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d6a55ad | On the one hand, I try to define myself and behave officially as a no-nonsense hyperrealist ferreting out the role of chance; on the other, I have no qualms indulging in all manner of personal superstitions. Where do I draw the line? The answer is aesthetics. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cd45445 | from increasing the number of people in the "tails," that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b33a4bb | that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b1e5f03 | The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 27415ee | Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 964ee53 | If mankind conversed only of the things they understood, half the words might be struck out of the dictionaries. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 24f99fe | And where, then, is your sweetheart, Deerslayer?" "She's in the forest, Judith--hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain--in the dew on the open grass--the clouds that float about in the blue heavens--the birds that sing in the woods--the sweet springs where I slake my thirst--and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God's Providence!" | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 7d6f00c | that dog is more to be trusted than many a Christian man; for he never forgets a friend, and loves the hand that gives him bread. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| a635e27 | for though the quiet of deep solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature was speaking with her thousand tongues in the eloquent language of night in a wilderness. The air sighed through ten thousand trees, the water ripped, and at places even roared along the shores; and now and then was heard the creaking of a branch or a trunk, as it rubbed against some object similar to itself, under the vibrations of a nicely balan.. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 7bcc819 | every period of life has its necessities, and at forty-seven it's just as well to trust a little to the head. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| a41f2db | Mendacity and vulgarity can only permanently affect those who resort to their use. (Ch 17) | vulgarity words | James Fenimore Cooper | |
| 458b3d5 | Ah's me! if we could be what what we wish to be, instead of being only what we are, there would be a great difference in our characters and knowledge and appearance. One may be rude and coarse and ignorant, and yet happy, if he does not know it; but it is hard to see our own failings in the strongest light, just as we wish to hear the least about them. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| db04134 | for flowers that will bloom in a garden will die on a heath... | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 8d5fd8e | Life is sweet, even to the aged; and, for that matter, I've known some that seemed to set much store by it when it got to be of the least value. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| d0b747c | When the colony's laws, or even the King's laws, run ag'in the laws of God, they get to be onlawful, and ought not to be obeyed. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 0134169 | nothing that crawls the earth is for my sport. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 56ec9a7 | My eyes are true and as delicate as a hummingbird's in the day; but they are nothing worth boasting of by starlight. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 9e79007 | Mankind twist and turn the rules of the Lord, to suit their own wickedness, when their devilish cunning has had too much time to trifle with His command. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| f959df9 | Come, friend; you are welcome, though your notions are a little blinded with reading too many books. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| ae0b0c9 | Friend, I am grieved when I find a venator or hunter of your experience and observation, following the current of vulgar error. The animal you describe, is in truth a species of the bos ferus or bos sylvestris, as he has been happily called by the poets, but, though of close affinity it is altogether distinct, from the common Bubulus. Bison is the better word, and I would suggest the necessity of adopting it in the future, when you shall ha.. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 26e9fa0 | The tree blossoms, and bears its fruit, which falls, rots, withers, and even the seed is lost! Go, count the rings of the oak and of the sycamore; the lie in circles, one about another, until the eye is blinded in striving to make out their numbers; and yet a full change of the seasons comes round while the stem is winding one of those little lines about itself, like the buffalo changing his coat, or the buck his horns; and what does it all.. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| f68116a | has dropped into the river," said Hurry, after looking carefully along" | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| b61beb6 | The result of this conversation was a sudden determination to produce a work which, if it had no other merit, might present truer pictures of the ocean and ships than any that are to be found in the Pirate. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 9530c3f | the Evil Spirit delights more to dwell in an artful body, than in one that has no cunning to work upon. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| cc3288e | I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized... | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 0c39a65 | I look upon the redmen to be quite as human as we are ourselves, Hurry. They have their gifts, and their religion, it's true; but that makes no difference in the end, when each will be judged according to his deeds and not according to his skin. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 9c77a4a | Even the robin and the martin come back, year after year, to their old nests; shall a woman be less true hearted than a bird? | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| e781deb | The woods are but the ears of the Almighty, the air is his breath, and the light of the sun is little more than a glance of his eye. | James Fenimore Cooper |