Tips from Pixar and Penelope Trunk on careers

Posted on | March 2, 2009 | View Comments

Do you ever have those times in life that seem to have themes?  My theme would be watching videos online, I watched two videos that made me think recently.

1.

I watched a video of Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University talking about some points of focus from Pixar.  One of the things they teach is improv and understanding that a key to successful improv is making your partner look good.  Wow! that blew my mind, I can count on one hand the times that I have done it for my coworkers, but with that core value of making your partner look good, everyone wins.  It was a great talk and the best quote from the clip was:

the core skill of innovators is failure recovery not failure avoidance

For me is was key because I want to try new things all the time, I want to promote change, but when I get on the edge of that metaphorical cliff I want to back down, I want to avoid the failure that could happen. That’s not to say I don’t jump anyway, but not often enough.  Instead I should consider some ways I can recover if it does fail and go with that in mind.

2.

I watched Penelope Trunk give a great honest talk about networking to students at Cornell.  And can I be honest? I’ve always had a personal love/hate relationship with her.  I appreciate her honesty, but at times I think she’s way too sarcastic and way too “this is about me”, but here’s the thing about watching her speak, I grew to like her and I declared it to the public with this tweet.  She appeared genuinely interested in helping the students at Cornell become better networkers.  From basic advice like, put your name tag on the right side of your shirt to if you reach out to her and you don’t hear back, just try harder.  As I watched I tweeted during watching it and I came out the other side appreciating her a whole lot more.

What have you watched recently that made you think?

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