In a retrospective chapter spanning a decade, Catmull revisits the consequences of Notes Day, a studio-wide feedback session held in March 2013. Before the event, Pixar struggled with a fear of breaking a 13-film winning streak, and it also faced rising production costs, undertrained leaders, and a decline in its cultural emphasis on candor. One colleague noted that the studio’s core dysfunction was a strain of perfectionism that drove crews to exhaust themselves and push budgets to unsustainable levels, even when directors told them to relax their standards.

Of all the Notes Day ideas, 29 were formally pitched to leadership. Seven produced major initiatives, and 14 yielded meaningful smaller changes. Nearly every subsequent film met the studio’s target of an 18,500 person-week budget, with The Good Dinosaur as the lone exception. The deeper lessons, however, were cultural. Two upper-level executives spent months categorizing the employee suggestions as actionable, impractical, or unresolved, distilling their findings into four topics: embracing healthy conflict, improving performance reviews, streamlining approvals, and strengthening the connection between crews and directors.

Several pitches were approved quickly, such as the proposal to promote gender equality by making background crowds default to 50% female and 50% male. A system called “Notesar” was devised to email questionnaires to crew members after in-progress screenings in order to capture feedback. Another proposal for assigning creative executive mentors to films in development became the foundation for today’s executive producer system.

Another team proposed the “Peer Pirates” program, which would assign non-manager department representatives to serve one-year terms; these individuals would be tasked with surfacing problems outside normal hierarchies. Catmull hoped that this measure would combat a growing trend toward keeping internal problems a secret from upper management. By early 2014, the first class of 28 Pirates was ceremonially knighted with cutlass swords.

In January 2014, producer Nicole Grindle and development head Mary Coleman noted that only 5 of 50 Pixar story artists were women, and no woman was in the pipeline to direct. With Catmull’s approval, they launched the Story Artistas, a biweekly mentoring program for those five women. Jamie Woolf and Pete Docter gave speeches at these meetings, reflecting on their own experiences. All five original Story Artistas now hold leadership positions; one, Domee Shi, became the first solo female director of a Pixar feature with the creation of Turning Red (2022).

After Notes Day, Pixar developed a manager-training program called Leadership Quickstart and eventually made it mandatory for managers. The performance review system was overhauled to include evaluations for executives. Notes Day also accelerated the studio’s reckoning with diversity. After organizational consultant Janet Crawford delivered a presentation on unconscious bias and ran a six-month training initiative, employees called for a dedicated DEI executive, prompting Pixar to hire Dr. Britta Wilson as its first Vice President of Inclusion Strategies. Wilson established Inclusion Learning Day, created seven Studio Resource Groups, and embedded herself in productions. For Soul, she helped convene an internal “cultural trust” of Black employees, coordinated research trips, brought on playwright Kemp Powers as a writer, and supported his eventual appointment as the studio’s first Black co-director. In November 2017, Catmull addressed Lasseter’s leave of absence following Lasseter’s acknowledgment of having engaged in unwanted physical contact with colleagues; Lasseter departed permanently in June 2018. Catmull concedes that he should have built better forums for disclosure much earlier, but he declines to discuss the terms of Lasseter’s departure, citing a confidentiality agreement.

The Peer Pirates initially underperformed, but after some restructuring, department-specific problems came into focus, the most prevalent being the inequalities of the film “casting” system, in which producers monopolized proven talents and marginalized others by miring them in repetitive assignments. In the new approach, department heads retained responsibility for their people’s long-term development. 

As various departments gained the ability to resolve their own complaints before issue were raised to the management level, the impact of Notes Day became widely apparent. Catmull explains that Pixar has not repeated Notes Day; despite its success in healing cultural issues, the event raised expectations that could not all be met and created a problematic sense of entitlement in some employees. The Peer Pirates were disbanded after five years, having adequately restored company candor. Catmull concludes that treating employee complaints as early warning signals led to record engagement levels, and that the long-term ripples of Notes Day continue to transform the studio’s cultural history.

Catmull recounts his accidental discovery that he cannot visualize images in his mind—a condition that neurologist Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter would later name aphantasia. He later found that Glen Keane, who helped to animate Ariel in The Little Mermaid and other iconic Disney characters, also had aphantasia, relying on emotional impulse and iterative sketching to create his drawings. Catmull later surveyed his colleagues, realizing that while quite a few animators had aphantasia like him, others had hyperphantasia—a heightened capacity for creating mental imagery. His own wife, Susan, has hyperphantasia, while their daughter, Jeannie, shares aphantasia with him. Armed with this knowledge, Andy Beall, former head of Pixar’s Animation Department, began explicitly protecting the work of aphantasic artists from being dismissed as slow or messy, explaining that their creative process was simply different.

This discovery leads Catmull to reflect on creativity and diversity more broadly. After Toy Story, he had quietly wrestled with how much of Pixar’s success could be attributed to him personally—a question he ultimately rejected as egotistical and inappropriate, as it is impossible to untangle individual contributions from a collaborative network.

The chapter then describes the SparkShorts program, announced internally in January 2016 after director Andrew Stanton observed that the studio’s established filmmakers might not always be the right voices for its future. The program gives emerging Pixar artists a small budget and six months to make a short film with minimal oversight and no requirement to pass conventional creative approvals. Films have addressed subjects ranging from gender dynamics in the workplace (Purl), to a gay protagonist (Out), to autism (Float), to a young Black woman’s identity (Twenty Something). Four SparkShorts directors are now developing feature films.

Catmull also describes his retirement farewell talks, in which he presented Pixar’s three key principles: making great films, believing in the power of safety, and valuing change and technology. In 2018, a studio task force codified Pixar’s culture into four shared values—community, innovation, ownership, and authenticity. Catmull discusses the many ways that Pixar leadership has sought to steward and shape the company’s playful, open culture, even approving a studio-wide miniature golf tournament. Stressing the distinction between passion and conflict, Catmull closes by arguing that creativity demands ongoing collaboration and a willingness to keep testing the limits of imagination.

Catmull offers a personal account of his 26-year working relationship with Steve Jobs, arguing that the dominant portraits of Jobs inaccurately portray him as an unchanging, imperious figure. In 1965, when Jobs purchased the computer division from Lucasfilm to form Pixar, he was frequently brusque and prone to overreaching in ways that generated ill will, but he eventually learned to temper his approach. From the start, however, he always maintained his respect for others’ unique expertise. He recognized Pixar’s creative depth and funded it without imposing his will on its filmmaking, bonding with Catmull and Lasseter over a shared commitment to excellence.

Two episodes illustrate Jobs’s evolution. During A Bug’s Life, he initially sided with marketing over the filmmakers on the question of widescreen format, but later allowed himself to be swayed when production designer Bill Cone challenged him directly and forcefully. Later, Jobs became deeply involved in designing Pixar’s new headquarters, creating an open campus that was engineered to encourage accidental encounters and cross-departmental communication.

In October 2003, Jobs quietly revealed to Catmull and Lasseter that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In the following years, he remained an engaged, if less frequent, presence. He showed Catmull an iPhone prototype and said that before his death, he hoped to launch transformative Apple products, secure Pixar’s future, and guide his youngest children to adulthood. He achieved all three goals. Jobs resigned as Apple’s CEO in August 2011 and called Catmull shortly afterward in what both understood to be a farewell. He died six weeks later.

At the memorial gathering in Pixar’s atrium, colleagues described Jobs as a creative firewall who kept the studio safe and held the bar for quality without attaching his ego to any specific position. Catmull recalls Jobs saying that while Apple products eventually ended up in landfills, Pixar films would endure—and that he felt fortunate to have been part of making them.

Catmull presents a list of concise management principles distilled from his years at Pixar, cautioning that each should function as a prompt for deeper thinking. He asserts that a great team can improve a mediocre idea, but the opposite is not true. He sees organizational fear and lack of candor as having identifiable causes that leaders must actively seek. He defines failure as an inherent consequence of attempting something new, and he says that communication should never be restricted by hierarchy. In his view, the goal is always to make the product great—not to perfect the process. He ends with a question, asking readers to focus on their specific situation and consider whether the least powerful person in the room feels safe to speak.