When we asked Nolan Bushnell to tell us about a time when he lost a game in life, he mentioned his having to sell Atari to Warner for twenty-eight million dollars. It was a loss to him, because he couldn’t move his company into retail consumer sales fast enough. But he made the decision with reason and intuition and went on to build other companies. At the time he visited our class, video games and his old company Atari were riding high with billions in sales. But conditions have changed since then, and so has Bushnell. His name now comes up as a backer of successful new technology.

In the difficult year after Toy Story’s debut, I came to realize that trying to solve this mystery would be my next challenge. My desire to protect Pixar from the forces that ruin so many businesses gave me renewed focus. I began to see my role as a leader more clearly. I would devote myself to learning how to build not just a successful company but a sustainable creative culture. As I turned my attention from solving technical problems to engaging with the philosophy of sound management, I was excited once again - and sure that our second act could be as exhilarating as our first.

If you run a business that is covered with any frequency by the media, you may face another challenge. Journalists tend to look for patterns that can be explained in a relatively small number of words. If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified. When managing a company that is often in the news, as Pixar is, we must be careful not to believe our own hype. I say this knowing that it is difficult to resist, especially when we are flying high and tempted to think we have done everything right. But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That’s not a weakness or a flaw. That’s reality.

Many of us have a romantic idea about how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. Then that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. The truth is, this isn’t my experience at all. I’ve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet I can’t remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started.

In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself.

Consider serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, a colleague of mine at Columbia and a legend in the startup world. He’s guided four companies to IPO status and mentored many more. To find opportunities, Steve says, an entrepreneur has to be endlessly curious and to recognize patterns that no one else does, by, as he puts it, ‘showing up.’ To validate ideas, he advocates ‘getting out of the building’ and learning how a potential innovation might change a customer’s life. He calls this ‘customer development.