Last week, I posted a blog about “snowplow parents,” and earlier this week posted one about keeping a “failure resume.”
Those thoughts were germinating when I read ANOTHER killer-good piece about how feeling frustrated at work can give rise to success. Here is how it began:
In 2000, Pixar was at the top of its game. “Toy Story” was released five years earlier, and it was the first computer-animated blockbuster on the silver screen. Three years later Pixar debuted “A Bug’s Life” to critical acclaim, and 1999’s “Toy Story 2” was the biggest animated hit of the year.
Concerned about resting on their laurels, the studio’s founders, Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull, hired the company’s first outside director, Brad Bird, to shake things up. Mr. Bird’s most recent film, “Iron Giant,” had flopped financially, and when he pitched his idea for a new movie to Pixar, he was told it would never work: It would take 10 years and cost $500 million to animate.
But Mr. Bird persisted. He recruited a band of disgruntled people inside Pixar — misfits whose ideas had been ignored — to work with him. The resulting movie, “The Incredibles,” won two Oscars and grossed $631 million worldwide, outdoing all of Pixar’s previous successes. (And, for the record, it ended up costing less than $100 million to make.)
We normally avoid frustrated people — we don’t want to get dragged down into a cesspool of complaints and cynicism. We see dissatisfied people as curmudgeons who halt progress, or, worse yet, dementors who suck the joy out of the room. And we have good reason to feel that way: A natural response to frustration is the fight-or-flight response. Disgruntled people often go into “Office Space” mode, choosing to fight by sabotaging the workplace, or flight by doing the bare minimum not to get fired.
But there’s a third reaction to frustration that we’ve overlooked: When we’re dissatisfied, instead of fight or flight, sometimes we invent.
