Creativity Ink by Ed Catmull

I spend a lot of time thinking about the creative process. Part of the reason that I read a lot of non-fiction books is that I believe that good ideas come from cross pollinization and that requires having a lot of novel ideas swarming around. Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull is a book I had heard about largely because of one story in it, but I like the name and the idea, so I read it.

The first half of the book did more to convince me I wanted to work for Ed Catmull than giving me any ideas of how to be more creative myself. The problem is that most of Pixar’s culture of creativity is build around collaboration and specifically candor. I enjoy collaboration and try to encourage people to be as honest as possible when reading my stories, but I don’t work with people as much as I want.

Since the book is largely a narration of the journey of Pixar as a company and once they got to the part where Pixar was bought by Disney it became more interesting to me. Part of it was that the story is more interesting but a lot of it is the ideas on fomenting a creative environment were more clear because he had the negative example of a company that wasn’t doing that.

This book ends with Ed Catmull writing on Steve Jobs. If you check this blog, you’ll see I don’t read a lot of biographies. That’s because I’m not a huge fan of the cult of personality that so many of them push. But Steve Jobs is an interesting person, and this was just about the perfect amount of talking about him.

If you happen to be running a business based on creativity with many people, perhaps making animated movies, then this book is going to have a ton of expert advice. But for most people, this is more about the history of Pixar than it is about how to create anything. It does that pretty well, but I’m not sure it does it well enough to make it something that I would recommend to anyone but the biggest of fans.