Big Magic is a beautiful meditation on the creative life and a reminder of how easy, and fun, it can be.

Gilbert believes ideas are disembodied energetic life forms that can only manifest through collaboration with a human partner. As potential human partners, we need to be open and relaxed enough to receive the idea and then courageous and committed enough to work with it to bring it to full fruition.

One of the most useful things in Thinking, Fast and Slow and the idea that serves as a framework for the 499 page behemoth, is the explanation of the characteristics, function and differences between two systems of thinking. System 1 is the involuntary, automatic, effortless system that responds immediately to situations (“fast thinking”). System 2 is the dormant system that is called on when system 1 runs into trouble and is more methodical, logical and energy sapping (“slow thinking”).

Creativity Inc.
Ed Catmull (President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation)
With Amy Wallace
Transworld Publishers 2014

According to the neuroscientist that Director Peter Docter consulted during development of Inside Out, only about 40% of what we ‘see’ comes through our eyes. The remaining 60% is created from memory or patterns that we recognise from past experience. Essentially, our brain ‘fills in’ the details we miss. I came across this idea for the first time when I was presented with text in which the first and final letter of the word are correct but the rest is scrambled or replaced with random letters. Surprisingly, I was able to read this with no problem because this mirrors how our brain operates – we need only to see a few crucial letters and our brain fills in the rest.

Considering the incompleteness of our visual models it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our personal perceptions and experiences are similarly flawed.

Creativity Inc.
Ed Catmull (President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation)
With Amy Wallace
Transworld Publishers 2014

It may seem inauthentic for the leader of one of the most successful animation studios to talk about failure, but the truth is that Pixar has had numerous misfires and “failures”. As President of Pixar, Ed Catmull has successfully encouraged his company to treat these failures as R&D investments and has encouraged productive and healthy responses to failure.

Ed believes failure is not a necessary evil but an inevitable consequence of doing something new. Despite a plethora of articles on failure and its benefits most of us still have the same emotional response to failure as we did as children; failure means we didn’t study enough, or we’re just dumb. And it hurts. To create and maintain a positive approach to failure we have to make sure this pain doesn’t entirely warp our understanding of its worth.