Walt Disney: The Entrepreneur

16 min readAug 14, 2020

Walt Disney — The Entrepreneur: Lessons I’ve learned about Business in the 21st Century from a Storyteller Mavrick from the 20th Century

The Man Behind the Myth

It’s easy to forget that Walt Disney was a real person, not just a caricature or company figurehead! Walt Disney was an artist, producer, entrepreneur, and a maverick game-changer who’s lived more than a century ago! Contrary to popular belief, Walt Disney was a shy, self-critical, and insecure man in private, who’s adopted a warm and outgoing public persona.

Walt had high standards and high expectations of those who worked for him. Although there have been accusations that he was racist or antisemitic, they have been contradicted by many who knew him firsthand. Legend has it that Walt Disney was turned down 302 times before finally getting financing for his dream of creating Walt Disney World!

As a young and aspiring entrepreneur, I’ve tried to emulate Walt in the way he conducted business in an era where cartoon and motion picture were juvenile entertainment with limited scalability. In fact, there was a period where cartoons were viewed as a 7 to 10-minute matinée feature before motion picture movies were played in theaters! The world of animation in the early 1900s was not a serious business at all because it was viewed as whimsical warmup sessions before movies were played, which were all without sound or even dialogue.

Very few people have managed to successfully change the world in both the entertainment industry and popular culture than Walt Disney! His many innovations include the first cartoons with synchronized sound, the first full-length animated feature film, and of course the first single-admission theme park, which was not popular at the time. Life has taught me that genuine innovation and original creativity usually come from very dark places that are peppered with misery, struggles, rejections, and depression, and Walt’s story is no different. While wholesomeness and nostalgic Disney’s trademarks may be, the forces that shaped this maverick character and his empire were much darker and more complex.

Walt Disney’s childhood was anything but normal or idyllic. His father, Ellias, was a strict disciplinarian who used to beat him up, which became a part of his daily routine. My father also was a strict disciplinarian, who physically beat me up, but that type of behavior was considered absolutely normal at the time during the early 80s, so let’s just say that I’ve had my fair share of whoopings. Young Walt found an escape from his father’s brutality through doodling and drawing. With pen-and-ink in hand, he created his own world, where life was always beautiful, people were always happy, and, most importantly, he was always in control. I too used to draw my favorite cartoon characters on paper, and I also built cardboard and paper structures to reverse engineer what I saw on my favorite cartoon shows. I created my own universe, where, just like Walt, I was in control.

After Walt’s stint in World War I as an ambulance driver, he moved to Kansas City, MO, where he took a job with Film Ad Co. The company’s principal products were animated advertisements that were presented before full-length feature films. It was at that moment while standing in front of the movie theater screen when young Walt found his calling! He absolutely loved bringing his lifeless 2D drawings to life through the magic of animation. Advertising was less than fulfilling for young Walt, so he converted his garage into a studio, borrowed equipment from friends and family, and began producing his own shorts with a bunch of his friends at his newly established company called Laugh-O-Grams.

Despite Walt’s early optimism, he found it very difficult to convince and persuade local theaters to show his work. Strapped for cash, Walt had to give-up his apartment because he can no longer afford the $3/week rent, where he was evicted and started living out of his office. Walt had to sleep on an old sofa chair and can only bathe once a week at a local train station paying a Dime for soap and towel. Walt ended-up surviving on cold canned beans, but all that sacrifice was to no avail. Walt felt helpless and didn’t know what else to do and despair started to slowly sinc in!

It wasn’t until Walt moved to Los Angeles in 1923 and teamed-up with his older brother, Roy, who took care of the business end of his venture, that Walt began to modestly prosper over the coming years. Walt’s first commercial success was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but even that ended-up being stolen away from him. Walt carelessly allowed the character he created to be copyrighted under his distributor’s name instead of his own. It was a mistake that Walt would never repeat, where in subsequent years, he would gain a reputation for keeping tight control over his creations.

The painful experience that Walt had to endure during his early years' mimics that of mine when I was a young engineer struggling to find a job fresh out of grad school. The situation got so bad that I can barely make ends meet. To make sure that I continue keeping my name floating around amongst prospect employers, I presented cutting-edge machine design techniques using 3D CAD design as a guest speaker at various seminars and conferences, which meant I was waved from admission fees, but I still had to travel there. I had just enough money to drive-up to the conference, but I couldn’t afford paying for the hotel room because all of my Credit Cards were maxed-out! I had to park my car next to the closes McDonalds situated next to the exhibition hall and slept in my car. In the morning, I would use McDonald’s restroom and grab myself a cheap meal and head-out to the event. Those were definitely tough times, but they made me appreciate the good times that came later on in my career. Thanks McDonalds!

Walt has proven that circumstance & education do not dictate the type of person you can be or the heights that you could elevate to. His life lessons are timeless and are relevant to young entrepreneurs today; like yourself! I’ve used multiple references to develop this article, which I’ll list them pictorially below:

What We Can All Learn from Walt Today!

Here are 8 lessons that I’ve come to learn from Walt & I strive to achieve greatness through my work at DarTec Engineering & HealTec Rehabilitation by telling compelling stories through the products and services that we provide.

1. You Must be a Salesman

Selling is the most important skill you can master as an entrepreneur or a business owner. Walt believed in himself and his dreams & could therefore convince others to believe in him too. Halfway through making Snow White, Disney ran out of money to finish the film. Even his own family begged him to give it up, but Disney was undeterred. He personally traveled to different producers & showed them the raw footage & convinced them to finish financing the film. Snow White became an instant success & ushered in the Golden Age of Animation.

2. Leadership is about Inspiration, Innovation, and Focus

The key to Walt Disney’s leadership is that he was an incredible storyteller! It’s one thing to tell your employees to do something, it’s another to inspire them to action. Walt would tell them a story. He would go into extreme detail and make it come to life. He would inspire his workers and make them a part of that story and as a result he would get more from them. When he was first pitching his animators on the story of Snow White, he went through the entire story, acting out the characters, even doing their different voices and movements. Walt had a unique ability to hire people more talented than he was and to focus and coordinate their attention towards a common goal. He admitted that he was a terrible animator. So, he hired the best he could afford and focused on innovating the company. He also knew his workers, where he knew what they were capable of doing and he didn’t accept anything less than their best!

3. Always Improve (Compete with Yourself)

Walt Disney could have rested on his big successes in animation, but that wasn’t his style. Instead, he completely switched gears and set out to build an amusement park where parents and children could have fun together. Once Disneyland opened, Walt would walk around the park, personally testing all the rides, noticing if anything was out of place and asking the guests their opinions. If he noticed something was wrong, he would personally see that it was fixed. As his animators could attest, good enough was never good enough for Walt Disney.

4. Develop a high Tolerance for Risk

Walt took a lot of risks in his career, where several times, the future of the entire Disney company hung in the balance. A few times Walt even had to mortgage or sell his personal possessions. He never did this lightly, where he carefully weighed-out his options and made decisions for bold action, and once decided, he never wavered or hesitated. In 1955, Disneyland was considered the biggest gamble in the history of American business at the time. Walt struggled to find financing even from his own family, including business partner and brother Roy, who begged him to give it up! At the time, nothing like Disneyland Park had ever been attempted, so there was a general consensus by critics that it was impossible and would likely fail if ever attempted. Walt pushed forward anyway despite overwhelming skepticism. If Disneyland had failed, it would have bankrupted the entire company and everything he worked so hard to build would come crumbling down like a house of cards. Today, the Disney theme parks bring-in huge sums of revenue and millions of visitors each year!

5. Change your Attitude Towards Failure

If Walt Disney was known for one thing more than his theme parks and animation characters, was how he responded to setbacks. Walt failed a lot, but that never deterred him. Walt strongly believed that failure was NOT a necessary evil, rather, it’s the only way towards sustainable and scalable success! His first studio, Laugh-O-Grams never made a profit, but the most notable win was the fiasco of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, where he lost everything, his studio, his equipment, his animators, and even his creations. But from the ashes of that immense failure rose one of the most beloved characters ever created that we’ve all come to know and love. On the train ride back home from New York after he learned that he had lost Oswald, the idea of Mickey Mouse started to germinate in his head when he was at his lowest low. Sometimes, creativity is born when we are at our deepest despair and all hope seems to be lost. I’ve come to learn that we can achieve tranquility in life when we develop a healthy relationship with failure, resist depression from holding you back, and work harder than even when ambiguity and anxiety seem to be crippling you next step forward. Embrace facing the unknown!

6. Believe in Yourself, Even When Everyone Else Say’s You’re Crazy

Throughout his entire career, Walt was told what couldn’t be done and why he couldn’t do it. He was told no one would sit through an animated feature film for more than 10-minutes. He was told that he couldn’t mix animation with real life actors. He was told his idea for a theme park would fail miserably. Someone even told him that Mickey Mouse was a bad idea because a mouse would frighten women. He proved that just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t make it impossible! That’s because impossible was a word that small-minded people would use, and Walt Disney dreamed big! He had an unshakable belief in himself and what he was doing, and that’s all that mattered to him.

7. Resilience is an Entrepreneur’s Best Friend

Walt was turned-down 302 times when trying to find financing for Disneyland theme park before striking a deal with a television studio, and in the most unbelievable story, he was fired from his first job at a newspaper for not being creative and innovative enough! Resilience is the person’s ability to withstand or recover quickly from difficult circumstances. Walt faced many difficulties that would have made the average person give-up after a dozen tries. Walt was able to keep pushing himself and his team beyond their perceived limits because he believed in himself, his team, and his dreams, which gave him the resiliency to work harder and make his dreams a reality. He believed in doing whatever it took to get the job done and, therefore, he got results that far exceeded his wildest dreams.

8. Business is All about Telling Interesting & Compelling Stories

Empathy is at the heart of innovation, and that was the secret ingredient that made Walt Disney the successful entrepreneur that we all came to know! Walt had the ability to create simple and emotional stories from familiar folklore that break-down barriers, whether that’s age group, nationality, race, or anything else in between. Walt managed to connect with his audiences on an emotional level, which allowed him to sell his licensed products in large quantities. Stories are usually about human connection, focusing on simple details and weaving beautiful and vibrant stories with an array of animated and whimsical characters. The messages that can be taken from Disney’s stories can be translated into multiple languages that is easily understood, and surprisingly things don’t get lost in translation! Even some of Disney’s old stories are timeless, where they’ve managed to adapt to suit current events. Storytelling has often been a source of progress too, where good stories can be at the forefront of change as they create a powerful narrative around a particular issue. If emotions allow you to connect to people, stories push people to act, and in Disney’s case, buy Disney merchandise!

Never Say Never!

After Walt lost the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he started searching for a replacement during a train ride from the East Coast to the West Coast, where the idea of creating a new cartoon character based on a mouse slowly creeped into his consciousness. Based on Walt’s recollection: “Mice gathered in my wastebasket when I worked late at night. One of them was my particular friend."

With the help of Roy, his brother, and Ub Iwerks, an illustrator from his Film days in Kansas City, Walt hashed-out his new character and Mickey Mouse was born! Later on, Walt released two Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts, but they were met with moderate success. The real breakthrough came in 1928 with the release of “Steamboat Willie”; The first cartoon to include a synchronized soundtrack, which became an instant hit! Even after all of Walt’s struggles, he was still considered as mediocre success.

It wasn’t until 1937 with the release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, where Walt gambled everything that he had and risked it all for the sake of what he strongly believed in. The cartoon was the first ever full-length motion picture movie that was 3-years in the making, which received raved reviews by critics who were sure that the movie would flop.

I can’t even start to imagine the amount of stress that Walt’s brother, Roy, had to endure for entertaining his brother’s crazy and wild idea hoping that they would just breakeven and not go bankrupt! “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” proved to be a massive success beyond the Disneys’ wildest imagination. Previously, Walt’s work was considered “The Sideshow”, but now it was “The Main Event!” Walt even received several Academy Awards for his work.

Walt had long dreamed of creating an amusement park based on his characters, and on one day while sitting on a park bench with his two daughters, an epiphany came rushing into his head!

As with the rest of his ambitious projects, Walt faced difficulties getting anyone to finance his project. Fast forward to the early 1950s, Walt ended-up mortgaging his life insurance, stock holdings, house, and furniture to purchase an orange grove near Anaheim, CA, and financed the construction of the amusement park. Opened in 1955, Disneyland quickly became one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions to this day! If you think about it, the amusement park is the real-life manifestation of the fantasy world that Walt had escaped into during his early years as a young child in Marceline, MO.

When you want to study successful people, don’t read about their massive successes; rather, read about their failures and setbacks. We become who we are based on how we react to the trials and tribulations that we encounter in life because they forge our personality.

When Walt was asked the secret to his success, he thought for a while and then he said this:

“I dream, I test my dreams against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true.”

Today, the rules of success are no different. If Walt Disney, a man with limited education from a poor family, could create an entertainment empire from almost nothing, so what’s stopping you from dreaming just as big?

If this didn’t inspire you to read about Walt Disney, you might consider watching one of the best movie documentaries that depicted the development process of the figure whom we’ve all come to know and love from a man to a myth…