YouSaid · the spoken record

Walt Disney

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63
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2024-04-22
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2024-04-22
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  1. “Was a way to make his mark since unlike newspaper cartooning, animation was something that Walt thought he might do better than anyone else in the world because so few people at the time were doing it and so few people had any expertise in it. The idea of being the best, the most noted clearly appealed to him. That's number one. That reminds me of Edwin Lan, his personal motto. He said his personal motto was don't do anything that someone else can do. And we'll see in animation. There was nobody in the world that could do animation in the way Walt Disney is going to wind up doing it. And he knew it too. There's a line that George Lucas says that somebody was describing a young George Lucas. It says that he knew how to do it and he was going to make sure everyone knew that he knew. Walt Disney, he would hold his entire team to what many people would consider like an unreasonably high expectation of excellence. And one of the lines he has about this, he's like, listen, if we were not excellent.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Training our experience for someone who had just lost his job, he was cocky. I felt well qualified, he would say, and he was already thinking of opening his own art shop, so he lost his job because that work was seasonal. It was just around the holidays, the Christmas holidays. Walt had met another animator, this guy named Oob Earworks, I think is how you pronounce his name. It's very weird. And he's like, oh, this guy's talented. And then impulsively, he's like, hey, why don't we just go into business together? And so even though they were both high school dropouts, it says Walt Disney had grandiose big dreams. He had outsized aspirations. And one thing that his early partner said about him that Walt was completely self-absorbed, but listen to this. So he says, he once remarked that while he and other artists played poker during breaks, Walt would sit at his board drawing board, practicing various renditions of his signature. He knew he knew one day he was going to do everything he could.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And so this trial ends, the founder of the company approaches him, looks at over all of his work, and immediately offers him a salary of $50 a month. And I love this part. I love this part. Walt later admitted that he would have worked for much less, and he was so grateful, he said, that I could have kissed him. They're paying me to draw pictures. They're paying me to draw pictures, he told his aunt. That's exactly what Stephen Spielberg, if you listen to Stephen Spoilberg episode, right? This is much later in his life. I think he's probably 50 years old at the time, an old friend of his comes and visits his movie set. I think it's the movie 1941, if I recall correctly. And he just looks around. He goes, do you know they pay me to do this? And so this part is just incredible. He gets his first job and he's like, I should start my own company. One of my favorite facts about Walt Disney is by the time he was 20. His first company, by the time he's 20, he's already gone bankrupt with his first company. And then he just immediately starts over again and just does it better the next time. So it says for someone virtually without.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And so he's so anxious during this first week. What does he do again? He never leaves the drawing board, not even taking a break to relieve himself until lunch. He doesn't, guy wants to pee his pants. He never pieces pants, but he holds it until the meal breaks. And I know I keep pounding on that, but it comes up over and over again. I just think it's such an interesting total engrossment into his work.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “He was determined to be successful, that sadistic determination, raw ingenuity, and sadistic determination, right? He had absolute faith in himself. And this is why I always say that what's one thing that's obvious when you read a bunch of biographies that belief comes before ability. This is the Walt Disney version of belief comes before ability. He brimmed with a self-confidence that was neither entirely justified nor particularly well directed since he had arrived without a plan. He was a go-getter who did not know where he was getting to, only that he would get somewhere. So there's all these companies in Kansas City that are doing advertisements or like drawing ads for companies. They're called commercial art shops is what they were called all the time. And he sees an ad where they're looking for an apprentice. And so he shows up. Here's the thing. When you show up, he gets a one, first of all, they hire by the way that this company hires is that just by trial. It's like you're going to work here for a week. We have no idea what you're going to get paid. We have to see if you're good or not.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And so now we have a very young Walt Disney. He's 18, 19 years old. He goes to Kansas City, and he's determined to be successful. So this is where I mention, this is line in the George Lucas biography that I thought was interesting, where he would like shoot so much footage, as many, as much as he can, and like, you know, a handful days. And then he spend like 10 weeks editing and really figuring out where this all goes together. I did something similar this week, just several days just rereading over and over again about like what is the main thing I'm trying to take away from this book. And this is when I realized I might title this episode Walt Disney, how Walt Disney created himself or something like that because it's very obvious. Like he made himself. And in doing so, that was the foundation which he can lay on top of the company that he built. The empire that he built. But first, he had to make himself. And so even when he's 18 and 19, he's meeting all these new friends in Kansas City, almost all of them remark on the same, they say the same thing, these same descriptions over and over again.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “About a year later, he gets back home, and this is where he's just rebelling against his father's offer to work at a jelly factory. This is just like George Lucas, what I just said. And again, this main theme of escaping. I'm escaping from this world. I do not like, and I will create myself and build a new world. That's exactly what Walt Disney did. And him and his father go back to fighting verbally this time. And Walt says, he never understood me. He thought I was a black sheep. He said it was nonsense that I wanted to draw pictures, that I should secure a stable job. He didn't understand why I would sacrifice the certainty of the jelly factory for the uncertainty of art and listen to this description. So 17-year-old Walt Disney, newly armed with confidence and determined to avoid his father's fate, determined to avoid his father's fate, the joylessness, and the constant disappointment while Disney would pursue his opportunity, he would escape.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And so there's one event outside of Walt Disney's control that is going to delay his getting a job as a cartoonist. And that is World War I. I mentioned earlier that he had three older brothers. They all go off to fight in World War I. Walt Disney's not old enough. He's trying to get his parents to sign a waiver. They refuse to do so. He wants to join the army and fight just like his older brothers do, right? Because he says he thought of the war, but as an adventure, which is actually a very common theme among young American men in both World War I and World War II. So they would refuse to do that, but they did let him join the Red Cross where he would be an ambulance driver. And so just after he turned 17, he's stationed in France to be an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Now, there's a line here I need to share with you because, again, everything is about escaping this world that he did not like, this childhood that he did not like. So he regarded his time.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And so he would find cartoonists that worked in newspapers that he admired. And in many cases, these cartoonists were also teachers. So he starts attending classes at night taught by some of his favorite newspaper cartoonists. And there's a line here. This is the first time it says this, right? But this is something he does over and over again. It says he was, Walt Disney was so entranced that he would not even take a bathroom break. I'm not even kidding. This was a shocking to me. How many times he gets so engrossed in his work that he won't go even go, he won't even stop to go to the bathroom. And when I got to this paragraph, it made me think of Steve Jobs because Steve Jobs talked about his heroes over and over again. Two of his heroes were Edwin Lan and Walt Disney. And so this idea, this total engrossment in his work that is very evident when Disney's first starting his career all the way till he's in the hospital dying. He knows he's dying and he's going over.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And just like George Lucas, he's going to fight against what his father wants to do for work. George Lucas's dad wanted him to work at the stationary store. And George was like, no, I'm going to make a living doing what I love. I'm going to be a filmmaker. You see the exact same thing here. His dad wants him to work in like this jelly factory. He's like, no, I'm going to be a cartoonist. Now, before he does that, though, before Walt Disney has this idea, he's like, no, I'm going to be a cartoonist. He has to design his own curriculum. And this is so important. So he's spending all his time practicing drawing, living in his own world, right? But he even says there's a great line in the book. It's like when he wasn't drawing, he was thinking about it. But he would also seek out additional help. So there's these cartoonists in his original idea for his life was not to build the world's first multimedia corporation. His idea was like, oh, well, there's cartoonists that people get paid to write to like draw pictures. Who does that? Oh, newspaper cartoonists. Okay, so that's what I'm going to do.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's episode 161. One of the things that's in the book is very fascinating. It talks about how he met his wife. And I think they're in college at this time. And she's sitting next to him in class. I don't even think they're dating yet. And he's not paying attention to anything that's going on in class. He's drawing. And so there's three highlights I want to pull from that book real quick that is almost exactly what's taking place in Walt Disney's life at this point. She says, you're not very interested in the lecture. Then she leaned in, pointed at one of his drawings, and said, I think that's a very good flying cow. And in this book, it says maybe the most important thing that anyone ever said to him comes from her. You're crazy to be a professor, she told Ted. What you really want to do is draw. Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him. Here was a man who could draw such pictures. He should be earning a living doing that.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It says he had never stopped drawing. He spent hours decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classrooms by riffing through them to make them move. He drew constantly. He drew even though it was not always a socially, it was not always socially acceptable to draw. People would make fun of him. They said it was sissy. It was Sissy for a man or a young boy to draw. But that did not deter Walt Disney. It became the primary source of his identification even in our seventh grade classroom. We all knew you'd be a really great artist one day, some kind of artist genius of some kind. Because even in the seventh grade, that's all you did. And so it's remarkable that it mentions that, hey, he's sitting in class instead of paying attention to class, he's decorating the margins of his textbook years ago. I read a biography of Dr. Seuss, whose real name is Theodore Geisel, I think, is how you pronounce it. And one of the things that's in that...”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And that leads directly to another main theme of this book and to how Walt Disney created himself. He retreated into his own world and then built his own. Maybe more than any other entrepreneur you and I have studied. This is the most obvious because he literally built Disney World, I guess, was the one that was completed when he was alive. That is a fantastic metaphor for what he was trying to do his entire career. He wanted to escape and then control his environment. And this tendency was so pronounced. He only has like a seventh or eighth grade education. When he's in school, though, the teacher thought he was the second dumbest person in the class. That is literally a quote, the second dumbest. But if you would talk to him away from school, you're like, no, no, this guy's clearly quick. We did. He's clearly smart. He's clearly driven. So why is the teacher saying you're the second dumbest person in the class? Because all he wanted to do all day in class was not classwork. He wanted to draw. He would sit silently in a corner and draw. He was secluded in his own world. There's a line in the book.”

    2024-04-22 · Founders · #346 How Walt Disney Built Himself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source