Legacy
Ed Catmull about Steve Jobs:
“That was why Pixar made him (Steve Jobs) so proud – because he felt the world was better for the films we made. He used to say regularly that as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually, they all ended up in landfills. Pixar movies, on the other hand, would live forever. He believed as I do that because they dig for deeper truths, our movies will endure, and he found beauty in that idea”.
From the book Creativity Inc.
The hidden aspect of creation
My friend, Erez, says I am a serious person. “Serious people are rare these days”; he goes on to say. I don’t know about that. When I commit to a project, big or small, I only know that I have my unearthed reasons that lie dormant in me. As Angela Duckworth defines it in her book Grit, I have a “Calling” in life and in the projects I get involved in. I am called to do them. Sometimes, I know that inner hidden part in advance, like when we established the “Freedome Project” in Binyamina in 2000. I invested a year and a half envisioning that project before coming back to Israel to establish that first Israeli contemporary circus space.
Changing the world
In 2003, my Father was elected a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US. He was invited to a ceremony, and he asked me to come with him. I didn’t want to come, I’m not sure what I was up to at the time, but I was busy. I always am. He insisted, saying he did not know how to knot his tie or what to wear and that he needed me to assist him in getting a suit for the occasion, a rare one indeed. He never wore suits, almost ever. That was a lame excuse, but I relented and took three days off from whatever essential things I was busy with at the time.
After the ceremony, there was a celebratory banquet at round tables. We were eating a delicious meal when tapping my thigh under the table; my father said: “you see all these people, Orit? Sitting in one room? This is a rare occasion, one you should cherish in your memory. In their way, each of these people changed the world and human life. These are thinkers whose work changed how we experience and view life”.
That was when I understood what we were all up to for the first time. Until that moment, I didn’t know.
That moment is carved in my mind as the moment my whole life changed, and consequently, the way I “do life” or may have made a difference for the people around me.
