Ninety-five percent of the results of creativity are garbage. Derek Sivers has been very inspiration to me in the sense of asking himself, “How good was my failure today? What did I try that didn’t work?”  That for me is a real inspiration. To every day try and do something that I could have failed at. That is part of the process. That acceptance of small failures.
-       Kevin Kelly on CreativeLive

Below, an excerpt of an interview by Tim Ferris of Ed Catmull for the book The Tools Of Titans. Catmull is President of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studio. and author of Creativity Inc. 

Ed Catmull: The final film bears no relationship to what we start out with. . . All our films to begin with suck. We had to start over internally with Toy Story II. We had to do it with Ratatouille. All of our films to begin with suck.

Tim Ferris: Why do you say that? Just that the rough draft is really rough?

 Ed: This is the big misconception that people have. That in the beginning a new film is the baby version of the final film when in fact the final film bears no relationship with what you start with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean this because we are self-effacing or modest. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

-       Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

The creative process is about failure. People who can't live with failure should go to work at the post office. The creative process is about writing your book for years and then throwing it in the fire one night because you know it is no good. And the creative process is about starting again the next morning and doing it right. And then, when you finally get it written so that you feel okay about it, no one wants to publish it. It gets rejected and rejected. But you keep trying because you believe in it. You believe you have something to say. So yes, there's ego involved. And maybe some alcohol. Maybe you need a little alcohol to believe that the world is wrong and you are right.

Then there's the other failure in the creative process and in life—a lack of belief in yourself, a lack of self-discipline. You are supposed to sit down and write your book, but instead you answer emails and meander around on Facebook. It is a lot more fun approving friends on Facebook than it is failing at a painting. Picasso created over 50,000 works of art in his life. He did 10,000 of those in the last ten years of his life—that's an average of three a day when he was in his eighties. If you think those were all masterpieces you haven't seen them, but regardless of what he did or didn't do the previous day, he got up in the morning and went to work.

He didn't fool around on Facebook.