To ensure that it succeeded, I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds, I needed to put my own insecurities away. The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
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Although I am a product of my circumstances, I believe we carry knowledge within us from elsewhere, enabling us to make better choices in this life. If we get the right parents, as I did, these choices come easier. Inner knowing helped me choose the right mentors in the form of brave managers, who took the risk of betting on a darkie in time when people like me weren’t considered for thinking roles in business.
There will always be plenty to be afraid of, especially when you are doing something new. Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it. Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their trustworthiness, over time, through their actions - and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure. The Braintrust and various groups within Pixar have gone through difficult times together, solved problems together, and that is how they’ve built up trust in each other. Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.
I moved gradually to this action. I had watched the connections among my delegates and their connection to their learning dissolve as soon as the breaks began and the phones came out. After a few years I had become unwilling to foster this loss any more. And I realized I was willing to lose business if necessary in order to stop this infiltration of the platform system of interruption. I wanted to restore the full, attentive, undistracted human mind to every minute of our study and practice. I have lost no business.
People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. Amy set herself up for success by thoughtfully using prompts to design changes. Those changes worked because they helped her do what she already wanted to do. And that success? That felt good.
I asked, “If you could pick one trait that would predict how someone would turn out, what would it be?”
“That’s easy,” he said. “How willing they are to change their mind about what they think they know.”
The most valuable people, he continued, weren’t the ones with the best initial ideas, but the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds. They were focused on outcome over ego. By contrast, he said, the people most likely to fail were those obsessed with minute details that supported their point of view.