Pete Docter Quotes

Success Comes Through Rapidly Fixing our Mistakes Rather than Getting Things Right the First Time.

Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.

There is no single way to train, or do anything well. You have to keep thinking, keep doing things.

I have ideas that I think might be amusing, and I try them, and if they look right, I carry them out, and if they don't, I throw them out and try something else. I don't agonize about it.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.

Generally, our first idea of what our business is going to be is not the right one. It takes a few iterations; to get there, you have to be able to let go.

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.

Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

Having the security of being in a series week in, week out gives you great flexibility; you can experience with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, 'Well, I won't do that again,' and you're still on the air next week.

Michael Marcus taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me about making your best judgment, being wrong, making your next best judgment, being wrong, making your third best judgment, and then doubling your money.

Instead of writing it wrong six times and then writing it right, I think it wrong six times and then write it right the seventh time.

Sometimes there's something that you need a few takes to get it and if it takes 15 takes, it takes 15 takes. It really depends.

To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.

I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

Mistakes don't scare me or bother me. If I feel like I made the same mistake twice, then I feel like I've really screwed up. But if I make one mistake and learn from it, hey, to me in the game of life it's just as important to know what doesn't work as what does. So I think mistakes are a good thing.

Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.

Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you've got, and fix it as you go.

I like to adapt to a director's way of working. I love doing that. Each director is so different, and you have to adapt to this new way of doing something. That's what's amazing to me. That's why I love directors. I don't want to director to have to work around me. I think it's more fun for me to come in on their thing.

I always make mistakes and I always fix things up, as best I can, in the cutting room.

It's not like you get up in the morning on the first day of shooting and say, 'I'm so smart today I'm going to determine every choice I make from now until a year and a half from now.' So it changes. You gain insights. The movie bucks you.

I am from time to time congratulating myself on my general want of success as a lecturer; apparent want of success, but is it nota real triumph? I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again. So there is no danger of my repeating myself, and getting to a barrel of sermons, which you must upset, and begin again with.

40% of what I've done was a mistake. I now call it R&D.