Words From Walt
Page 13 of 20
December 20
You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you. |
One of Walt Disney's greatest successes was a direct result of one of his greatest failures. His failure to secure an extension of his contract to produce the Oswald series led to the creation of Mickey Mouse and animation history. Rising from the ashes of failure punctuated Walt's career as he rebounded from each "kick in the teeth" to become stronger personally and professionally.
Walt would often gamble nearly all he had to see his dreams come true. This maverick attitude would actually pay off to the surprise of nearly everyone but Walt. Dreams may have offered too little collateral to the financiers but believing in his own dreams and having the wherewithal to make them come true was invaluable to Walt.
Early in his animation career, Walt would often win small successes, which were followed by minor setbacks. He founded several companies that would fold or go bankrupt. A partnership between Walt and Ub Iwerks would be put on hold after Walt took a good paying job at an ad agency. His Laugh-O-Grams Films would go belly up with the bankruptcy of the distribution company. The discouragement of these failures in Kansas City would convince Walt to give up animation all together and move to Los Angeles with the hopes of becoming a live-action director. When Walt found it difficult to break into the film industry, his brother Roy encouraged him to start up his animation business again.
New success would find Walt with a fresh start in Hollywood, as he would develop the live-action girl in the cartoon world of the Alice Comedies. With the loss of Oswald and nearly his entire animation studio, Walt would find success with Mickey Mouse cartoons and Silly Symphonies. By this time, Walt had experienced enough setbacks to allow him to recognize when to take calculated risks to help minimize the potential for failure. He risked it all with the creation of the feature-length animated cartoon, which paid off handsomely. He turned around and risked all of this success with the building of a new studio in Burbank and the production of a new slate of films.
A strike by his artists and America's entry into World War II would prove the next major obstacles for Walt to overcome. Production on features telling a single story would halt. Assets in foreign markets would be frozen. A patriotic insistence on not profiting on training films kept the studios from doing much more than get by. By the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, Walt would regain his golden touch with the return of the singular-storied animated feature, the embrace of television and his biggest gamble of all - Disneyland.
Disneyland represented the ultimate make-or-break proposition for Walt. Roy urged Walt to not use company funds to develop the park. Lillian preferred that Walt not build the park and risk a lifetime of work. Walt would sell his vacation home in Palm Springs, borrow against his life insurance and sink every penny he had to finance the $17 million construction of his Magic Kingdom. The gamble would pay off. After all of the success and all of the setbacks of his career, Disneyland would make Walt Disney and Walt Disney Productions financially solvent.
In our society, a person is often celebrated by the amount
of success he or she has had in life. But a truer measurement may well be calculating the
amount of failure that person has faced and multiplying it by the heights that he or she
reached after facing that failure. Without the kick in the teeth that Walt received, he
may never have been persuaded to reach for bigger and better. Knowing the risks of failure
made the taste of success all that much better. To Walt, failure was simply a part of
success - a part he was successfully able to minimize as he pursued and achieved his
dreams. Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping
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-- Matthew Walker
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