Mantras Don’t Carry Us Through. We Do.

I recently came across something in my morning reading that I really found powerful and I wanted to share with you. The book is called Creativity Inc., and it’s about overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. It’s by Ed Catmull, who’s co-founder of Pixar Animation. It’s, um, it’s a wonderful book, so shout out for that in the first place.

But here’s the thing that I came across, and it got me thinking. I’m gonna read it in a minute, just this little chapter. But what he’s talking about here is how we sometimes come up with phrases to help us power through—mantras, if you want. And, well, I’m gonna go ahead and read it, and maybe we can talk about it a little bit after.

So he says, “Coming out of Toy Story, we thought that ‘story is king’ and ‘trust the process’ were core principles that would carry us forward and keep us focused, that the phrases themselves had the power to help us do better work.” And it’s not just Pixar people who believe this, he says, by the way. Try it yourself. Say to somebody in the creative world that story is king and they will nod their head vigorously. Of course, it just rings true. Everyone knows how important a well-wrought, emotionally affecting storyline is to any movie, or really any creative process, right?

He goes on to say, “Story is king” differentiated us, we thought, not just because we said it, but also because we believed it and acted accordingly. So he goes on to talk about it, right? And how they used it and how they trusted the process, and story was king.

But parroting the phrase story is king at Pixar, he says, didn’t help the inexperienced directors on Toy Story 2 one little bit. He said this guiding principle, while simply stated and easily repeated, didn’t protect them from things going wrong. In fact, he says, it gave them false assurance that things would be okay.

He goes on to say that likewise, “trust the process” was a phrase they used all the time, but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. It had morphed into assume that the process will fix things for us. It gave them solace, which they felt they needed, but it also coaxed them into letting down their guard, and in the end, he says, made them passive. Even worse, he goes on, it made them sloppy.

So once this became clear to him, he began telling people that the phrase was meaningless.

Here’s the part that really stuck with me. He says, “Imagine an old heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is ‘trust the process’ or ‘story is king,’ some pithy statement that seems on the face of it to stand for so much more. But the suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase—the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often we grab the handle and without realizing it walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase.”

Wow. What do you think about that? The idea that we surface-level lead from these phrases, hoping that they will guide us, hoping that by saying them, reiterating them, or posting them on the wall for that matter, that it’s going to do something.

I love, love, love what he says about how words like quality and excellence can be misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless. When someone comes up with a phrase that sticks, it becomes a meme. It’s so funny, he says this, and I’ve said it a million times to my clients, which is: it’s about excellence being earned. It’s about living in our values and our experience and all those things in that suitcase, isn’t it?

I leave you with that thought. And I hope that you found this valuable. Shout out to Ed Catmull and his wonderful book, Creativity Inc., for really getting me thinking this morning.

Listen to Audio Version here!