#30 The Philosophy of Walt Disney (Part 1)

In 1928, he's on a train ride back to California. Walt had just lost everything. The character he built his studio around was gone, taken from him in a contract he didn't fully control. Most of his team, they left with that contract. For the first time, Walt Disney was sitting there with nothing. No studio. No hit character, and no clear path forward. Just a notebook and time to think. And somewhere on that train ride, he starts imagining something new. Not just another character, but a something bigger, right? A mouse. That idea becomes Mickey Mouse, and that becomes the foundation for everything that comes next. And it never really stops there. Because Walt never thought in terms of what's next. He thought in terms of we have worlds to conquer here. And this is my intro into my new episode, which is going to be about Walt Disney. And right now I'm reading this book called The Official Walt Disney Quote Book. And the whole idea of this book is it's just little maxims from Walt Disney, basically going through his entire life and not necessarily life, but certain themes. So like, What does he think about money? What does he think about family, movies, all this stuff? So I basically wanna walk through, I have like 30-something highlights and I really just wanna walk through like every single one and just figure out like, all right, what is Walt Disney saying here? How can it apply to your life? And his first one is, we have worlds to conquer here. It's truly incredible when you think about it because all these great entrepreneurs, they don't think of making money and we'll get to that later. But there's no idea of like, or there's no really thought of like money. I'm doing it all for money. The whole idea is that you make a great product and the money will follow. So my next quote and the next highlight I took from this book, we are not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the public. And this is exactly what Jeff Bezos said. If you like, basically, critics are always there, there's always gonna be haters, there's always going to be someone doing something that you're not gonna like, right? And that's why with like critics with movies and everything, they're not really that accurate most of the time. So this is really interesting. Jeff Bezos says, if you absolutely cannot tolerate critics, then don't do anything new or interesting because basically, you have to be the one innovating. You have to be like, if there's critics, if there's people in your life that are telling you you can't do something, you don't do that for them. You do it for the audience, the, the, the user, the actual people that want to buy your product. Critics are there to pull you down and you should never be doing something just for them. And it's also echoed in how Steve Jobs insisted that customers don't know what they want until we've shown them. So this is a great idea. So Steve Jobs basically said that customers, they don't know what they want. And I put this in here because I was like, it's so key. It's so important. Why is it important? Right? Well, it's important because it's exactly for the reason customers don't know what they want until You basically give it to them. You have to give it to them. You have to— they know they want something, right? But you have to be the one. Like, no one really wanted an iPhone per se. They just thought, you know, maybe I'll get a calculator, maybe I'll get a computer that does like one thing. But Steve Jobs was like, what if we can do like music and all these different things within one device? And that's what became like the iPod and the iPhone, right? So all these different people like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, they're all kind of saying the same thing where it's like, it's not about the critics, it's not about, it's not about the critics, it's not about people that are in that kind of crowd. It's for the audience, it's for the people in the public. Now, that's a great quote, and I'm just finding really interesting insights from Disney. So he says, films stimulate children to read books on many subjects. And again, I found this an interesting insight from Walt Disney. Films stimulate children to read books on many subjects. Why is that? Why is that? Well, the thing is, when you— he kind of talks about this in the book a little bit, and you should definitely get it. It's a great just like book to put on your shelf to really have it there when you want to reference ideas. He talks about like, we want people to basically watch our movies and then go read the fairy tales or read these older books. And so films stimulate children. So what kind of children, right? Well, Steven Spielberg, Chris Nolan, like all these people that are filmmakers, they will— they watch the movies, they read the books, they get interested. So films are a very positive thing for children when done correctly. Now, Disney had a belief that everyone has been remarkably influenced by a book or books. Now, interesting thing with this is that this is 100% correct. You, no matter if you read or not, you are always going to be influenced by books, whether it's a religious text, whether it's something that you read growing up, whether it's just reading from founders and entrepreneurs. Everyone has been remarkably influenced by a book or multiple books. For me, I read 38 books last year and I am just so thankful and grateful that I've been able to read that. I want to read more. I'm at 12 or 13 for this year. Right now at 12, I'm going to be going on to 13. Anyone can read books and the whole idea behind remarkably influenced That means that, so you don't wanna just read a ton of books and not change. What you want is you want to change with the books you're reading. So let's say for me, it's always an idea of like, can, so if I'm listening to an audiobook, right? I wanna pick up 1 to 3 really, really good ideas that I can hone in on. So if someone's saying, oh, you should be doing this and this and this, to save your time, right? I want to focus on one of those and I really want to just do that well and like, all right, I pulled out one really good thing from this 4 to 5 to 10-hour book and that's going to be my key thing. Now we go into the next part, next quote. We do everything our own way for ourselves with no outside interference. Disney took control of the animated market and he built from there. So We do everything our own way for ourselves. So there's a couple of things that factor into this quote. So one of them, right? We do everything our own way. This is original. This is authentic. This is authenticity and originality based into this quote. We do it our own way for ourselves. So the audience is like, I'm the audience of my podcast. I make this podcast so that way people like me, people that, you know, want to learn more about this are actually learning. But it's also for me so I can remind myself of the books I'm reading to teach myself in a way. So he's doing everything his own way for the— we do everything our own way. So in the company for ourselves with no outside interference, basically they take control of markets, they dominate worlds, right? And that's what they want to do. And they build from there. And then the next one, in this volatile business of ours, we can ill afford to rest on our laurels, even to pause in retrospect. So I kind of think multiple different ways about this. So first one, in this volatile business, we cannot rest on our laurels. What does that mean? Well, laurels and volatile, you never want to just stay where you're at. You always need to be innovating. And this reminds me of Elon Musk because he talks about speed. Set deadlines that 50% of the time you might make or you might not make. Set those really— like, the way I think about it is, how do you not pause in retrospect? How do you stop thinking about the past? Or how do you stop living in the past? It's by speed. You need to go fast. You need to go quick in order to get to that top echelon of entrepreneurs. You need to go fast and quick, just like Elon Musk talks about. And you cannot rest on your laurels. You constantly gotta be innovating as a company, no matter what you're doing, because the moment you stop innovating, the moment you start getting left behind. And Steve Jobs, he has a great line about this. He says that the mark of an innovative company is the ability to leapfrog when someone is behind. So it's almost the same operating rule, right? You got to make sure that you're— if you're an innovative company or if you're a company at all in the tech space right now, or just anything in general, you got to be able to come back. You cannot rest on your laurels. Whatever made you successful in the first place, there's going to be another company doing more than you. And that based off of Some of that is just speed. How fast are you going? Now, that's, and this is kind of related to this based off of Elon Musk. He says that this is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks, and when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers. When you've had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks. So what is this? Risk taking. Take those risks because if you don't take those risks and you've had that success for too long, and I don't really want to point out names, but I'm going to. So you have a company like Walmart, right? They have had success for so long that they've rested on their laurels and they don't take risks anymore. So now they, they're almost painted in the light of kind of a company like Kmart, which just went out of business. So you have these companies, right, that they're going full force and they're doing really, really well 20, 30 years ago and now they're resting on their laurels, they quit taking risks. And then when they quit taking risks, they ultimately become a stale company and they don't want to take any more risks and then they fall off the top. With Elon Musk right now, it's amazing what he's doing. He's going with Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX, all these different companies, Neuralink. He's going 100 miles per hour with each one, which is leading to the success of so many of them because they're going fast and they're taking so much risk that when they actually fail on those risks over and over and over again, they're so fast and like ahead of everyone else that they can just learn that mistake, learn from the mistake, take that failure as a win and keep going because they're so far ahead of everyone else. Now, the next quote is, caution there must be, of course, along with venturesome courage. The thing is, courage to take over industries is no small thing. We look at Elon Musk, and the reason why I'm referencing him so much is because I actually just listened to Erik Gorgenson's podcast that he did with David Sinra on The David Sinra Show. And on The David Sinra Show, he wrote a book called The Book of Elon. And I just got the book. I'm going to be reading it in the next couple of months. But one of the greatest things about this is that they're like— Elon took so much courage. He took— he had a lot of courage to take over industries like the space industry, the car industry, like all the industries that companies had lost or that entrepreneurs had lost hundreds of millions of dollars on. He decides to go in and persist and persist and persist. Until he reaches the top. Now we see he's the richest man in the world with $833 billion valuation, which keeps growing almost every month. And he's predicted to be the, like, the, the first man to a trillion-dollar net worth, which is insane. So there's so many different things, but Elon has taken over the space industry. He's taking over the car industry. He's leading the way in Neuralink. He's, you know, a decent competitor with Grok AI. XAI. You have X, he, he's helped with free speech. He has done so much for humanity that it's truly incredible. Now, this leads into my next quote, and it says, there seems little question that the human mind will absorb picturized information much quicker, much quicker than by the means of the printed word. So This is really interesting because when you think of like a comic book or a movie or something like that, the human mind is almost built for visual, you know, visual effects. So you can read a book and it takes a lot of work to read a book, but when you watch a movie, it's quick, it's easy. And part of that is on the filmmaker side. They're doing a, just a great job with that. But the other part of it is that your mind gets it much quicker. It's much faster. You see the visual, like you don't need to say the word apple to just see it. You know, you have the word. So it's really interesting. I thought it was just an interesting insight because people react to visuals more than they do with words, and it takes a lot of your attention span to go into that. So the next quote, This is a hilarious quote because this is super funny that Disney is doing this, the Disney company, even though Disney said this. So, and they put it in a book that came out in 2023. So a couple years ago, 3 years ago, they put it in a book, but yet it's not, you know, they haven't followed this advice. So he said, I never believed in doing sequels. I didn't want to waste the time I have doing a sequel. I'd rather be using that time doing something new and different. It's just hilarious that Disney said this because literally all Disney movies now have been sequels like Moana. You just go down the list. I don't want to name them, but you go down the list of all these different sequels they're doing. And this is also similar to MrBeast's, his kind of belief that every channel rehashes the same formats for years. So I've watched like many different YouTube channels and they do the same thing over and over again because they got like a video with 30 million views and then they got the same video with 30 million views again, then dropped down to 20, then 10, then 5, then now it's 1 million. It's because that you need to give viewers what they want and sometimes they don't know what they want. This is going back to Steve Jobs. They don't know what they want. And so you have to create that for them. You have to be a trendsetter and not a trend follower. So if you create a trend, you can't just follow that for years and years and years and it's the same thing. I've seen this with so many different social media accounts. I've seen it with YouTube channels. You got to be constantly bringing your A-game to new ideas and new things that possibly could be a lot bigger than what you're doing. The next quote: There could be no compromise on money, talent, or time. We did not know whether the public would go for our cartoon feature, but they were darned sure that audiences would not buy a bad cartoon feature. So the whole idea of this: do not compromise money, do not compromise, compromise talent or time. We did not know that the— whether the public would go for a cartoon feature. He's basically testing out the waters for animation to begin with. Animation. He is basically saying that he knows that they're still testing the waters of animation. This was back probably in the '50s, '60s, '70s. Some probably in the 30s to 50s. And so when you think about it, he wants to make sure that whatever they do, they do it to their fullest extent and to the best. And it's the same that Steve Jobs demanded of his, like, just task force. He said that you need to be a yardstick of quality. He says that some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. You need to be that yardstick of quality. You need to make sure that you're raising the standards every single time that you're putting something out, that you're making something, you're building something. You need to be that yardstick of quality. Now, the next quote: The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound with— bound up with my own personal and professional life. He still speaks for me and I still speak for him. This is just showing that Walt Disney's creation, he created something that would live on for decades. I mean, he created Mickey Mouse probably, yeah, in the '30s, in 1928. And here we are almost 100 years later, a century later, and we still have Mickey Mouse. It's It's insane that Walt Disney, who was born in like the 1900s, early, early 1900s, I think he was in World War I, World War II, and we had Mickey Mouse almost 100 years later. Now this goes into the next quote really nicely. He says, I hope, I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing, that it was all started by by a mouse. And this is really one of the greatest quotes from Disney ever. I, I cannot understate it. The whole Walt Disney brand that is close to $300 to $400 million in valuation is— it was all started by this one figure, this one mouse, like Mickey Mouse. It was literally started by a cartoon character. And we think about cartoons now as like, yeah, it's just a cartoon character, but really it's so much deeper than that. And what I mean by that is that Mickey Mouse was the, you know, embodiment of Disney. Disney, like, he poured his heart and soul into Mickey Mouse. And not only that, but Mickey Mouse was coming out during a time where there was no such thing as really good animation. Um, films or animation didn't have sound, so Disney was the first to create that. He was the first to create an actual good cartoon and really like define the whole genre of animation in America. Like he's truly done amazing things. And that's what makes that one of the greatest quotes from Disney ever. Now, next quote, there is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island. And which is, it's so funny. That he's saying this because Treasure Island, something I think that he put in Disneyland or it's a movie that he made. So he says, "There's more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main. And best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life." And this fits perfectly with Charlie Munger's view that there is no better teacher than history in determining the future. So you look back at the past in order to determine the future and there are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book. This is one of literally Charlie Munger's most famous quotes that I can remember. You can literally find billions of dollars in books. Like, it's no small thing. And with Naval Ravikant has this note on reading and he says that, well, he has this note where it's basically you read for leverage or you use reading as leverage for happiness and wisdom. And he has this quote too. That basically says that if you read for like an hour a day of like science, math, business, or some, like, there's like 3 or 4 different categories. If you read an hour a day, it will literally put you within the upper echelon of humanity. And I'm pretty sure he said like in the top 1%, if you did that every day for like a year, every day for 7 years, I'm, I'm getting mixed up, but it's like an hour a day. And The thing is, it's doable. Like, people can do it. It's just that, why is it so hard to actually read books? Well, Walt Disney said, "The right time for reading a story or an article or a book is important." And another quote is like, "Reading a book is a form of rehab for your attention span." You— so one of the craziest things is that social media, and I'm sure a lot of people know this, Social media decreases attention span. So every time you watch a 30-second video, a 60-second video, you're actually lowering your attention span. So it's actually harming your attention span. What does that mean? Well, for you, every time you watch a shorter video. So if you've noticed in the last like 100 years, we become desensitized to it. We have gone steadily from like in, you know, we've gone from reading books to like watching, you know, 2 to 3 hour movies to watching 20 to 40 minute YouTube videos to actually just watching 30-second YouTube Shorts or just Shorts in general. Right. And it's every single platform you go to Instagram, right? Instagram has like 30-second Shorts, 60 seconds. They actually penalize you on Shorts if you go over 60 seconds or you have to get verified to do that. It's because that people have decreased their attention spans. That's why reading a book, Listening to a podcast, reading an audiobook, like doing all these things increases your attention span and makes you more aware. That's actually how you get it. If people really want to know how to be successful and not just monetarily, not just in certain things, you just got to read more. You got to be an obsessive learner and increase that attention span. And the right time is basically when your attention and life context can actually absorb and use it. And this goes back to what we were saying, right? You need to be able to absorb that. Like at the end of the day, attention span doesn't matter as like you could be getting as much out of a 30-second video as you are out of like a 10-hour book, right? The whole idea is that you want to be able to use that information. So whatever you're doing, whatever you're learning about, whatever it is, you just need to be able to take that information and apply it to your life. Granted that it's good information. The next quote is that the fable is the best storytelling device ever conceived, and the screen is its best medium. So he's talking about just another interesting insight from Disney. The fable is the best storytelling device. Why? Why is that? Well, it's because it has a moral to the story. Fables are notorious and popular because of the morals. You think of like Cinderella, you think of all these different kind of movies that you grew up watching, like Disney Princess or all these things, you know, it's— there's a moral to the story and it's one of the best storytelling devices ever because when you have a moral to the story, people unders— understand that and they can relate to that. And the screen is its best medium. Again, he's talking about you can have books, right? But when you put it to picture, people absorb it so much better. Now, Another quote: until a character becomes a personality, it cannot be believed. Now, what did this remind you— remind me of? Well, until a character becomes a personality, it cannot be believed. This reminded me of Timothée Chalamet. And the reason why is because he's been going on this whole, like, campaign with Marty Supreme, and he's really embodied the character. I don't really know if that's how Timothée Chalamet is in real life. But I think he is such an incredible actor that he actually embodied it. So people believed like he's becoming this like, you know, crazy version of himself that's like insanely good at acting, doing all these things. He really embodied it. And that's just a modern example. But until a character becomes a personality, like something that someone can relate with, you can really— that's what the audience connects with. So it's the same with founders becoming personal. Personified brands like Elon Musk passing off his vision as a mandate from heaven. It's not like you just come up and show up to work and you just work to get a paycheck. It's like, no, we have to do this because we need to go to Mars, right? So people follow the personality just as much as the plan. They like being in that high— well, for Elon, they like being in that like high-speed environment, but for people in a story, they want to relate to the characters. They want to feel like they're actually there. Like in a book, you can actually feel like you're in another world. You're escaping to another world. And until a character becomes something that you can relate with, it really doesn't resonate with the audience. So it says, Walt Disney says, without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And this is actually a good litmus test, not just if you're a filmmaker, but also if you're into social media, right? You almost have to become this version of like, you know, you have to create a personality. Like, why should people watch you? Why should people listen to you? They need to be able to identify themselves with you in whatever way you, you know, you're portraying yourself to the world. Without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience. And this might be stretching it with the social media analogy, but you got to— like, this works definitely in movies. You need to have a personality. You need to have a protagonist and an antagonist or a hero and a villain. You need to show that, you know, whether you've gone through something hard or you've done something, you need to show that to the audience. And without that personality, a story cannot resonate with the audience. Walt Disney said, if I can't find a theme, I can't make a film anyone else will feel. And I think this is really interesting. Themes are like the most important thing, whether you have a podcast, whatever. If you have a movie, if you have all these things, you need to be able to have a theme. You need to be able to have something that people can think, oh, I remember that, or that's a great theme. Whether it's a sad theme or a really, really good deep theme, whatever it is, you need to have one. You need to have a good theme throughout the story. And this is identical to Simon Sinek's Start with Why. You need to have a central theme, not just a plot. You need to have the why, not just the how. You don't like— in other words, you can't just have a film. You can't just say we're going to make it this way. You need to have like a storytelling aspect to it. It also reflects Steve Jobs clarity on a single idea expressed clearly. Now you can have certain themes throughout certain ads or films or all that, but you need to have a single idea like what is the product? What is the thing that you offer for each product or ad? Now the next quote is about Disneyland and Disneyland. I've been there multiple times and Disneyland is one of the greatest things. That like it's just a truly amazing work that came from Walt Disney's mind. And so he said, when I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, but why do you want to build an amusement park? They're so dirty. I told her that was just the point. Mine wouldn't be. This is actually— this is exactly what Steve Jobs did with Apple. He's like, The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user-friendly. So the whole idea, what is the idea that encompasses what, what Walt Disney is saying with Disneyland and what is the idea that Steve Jobs does with Apple? It's that you challenge the status quo by design and by quality. You do it by quality. Now, here's another quote from Walt Disney in his quote book. He said that most— this is really interesting, but— and I don't— I'm pretty sure this was a quote from Disney, but he said that most popular of all with the kids in Stevie's neighborhood were Walt Disney's Sunday Night Disneyland series and The Mickey Mouse Club. This is really interesting. I actually don't think this is from The Disneyland book, I think it got mixed up in my notes, but this is really interesting because this was Steven Spielberg or Steve, Stevie as they called him. And he actually— he watched Walt Disney. So you can see the direct through line from Walt inspiring like a young Spielberg to Spielberg actually later just building his own worlds in these different movies like Steven Spielberg. I'm reading his book right now. He was so involved in like, how do I build this? How do I create this own world? It literally says in the book that he would like retreat into his own worlds. And he was just so fascinated with making movies. And like, he literally did it from the time he was like 12 years old, whenever he got his hands on a camera to like when he was 17, he actually won Arizona's award for the best like amateur producer in the whole state or something like, or amateur director. And it was like a short film, 6 minutes long or 12 minutes long. It was truly incredible. But you see that all these founders have the same idea. They retreat, they build their own worlds, and they resonate with each other and they connect with each other. So you see that Disney has a direct line to Spielberg because he was influencing him and they would watch it almost every Sunday. So the next quote from Disney is, "On our first television program, we showed you a blueprint for a dream. The dream is Disneyland. We promise to keep you informed as our dream became a reality." So actually what he's referencing there is in the first television program that Disney ever did, he was like, what if— so he got, I think, ABC to pay for it, but they would basically put it on and they would call it Disneyland and they had 4 different worlds and they would feature like people like Davy Crockett and all these certain things and all these certain people. And they were like, what if we had a land called Disneyland? And then eventually Walt Disney created that. But that was the whole idea of the TV show to begin with. They wanted the TV show to fund Disneyland. So when people would watch it, they'd be like, oh man, that's awesome. I wish that was real. And then now he says, we promise to keep you informed as our dream became a reality. So it became a reality. And then that was basically all hype. That was all hype to begin with. And it later is like one of the most successful theme parks in history. The next quote is, I remember when we opened, if anybody recalls, we didn't have enough money to finish the landscaping and I had Bill Evans go out and put Latin tags on all the weeds. I find this really funny because it's kind of scrappy. It's like Walt Disney was so focused on details and it was actually kind of chaotic. Like, first day of Disneyland was like, there was kids riding Autotopia. They were like crashing into each other. A couple of people got injured. Some of the cars were shutting down and they were actually like legit cars. And I don't think they put a speed limit on them, but like the most they could go is like 10 to 15, which is still a lot. And then you have like those and then you had like the Alice in Wonderland spinning teacups. They were shutting down. And so there was like a guy under there, like literally fixing it while they went. And then you had concrete, like, so they had a big parade and they had people come through and it was, they had laid the concrete beforehand, or I think it was asphalt the night beforehand. And the sun like heated it up. And so when like there would be ladies walking and they would get their high heels stuck in the actual asphalt, they have to like take out their shoes. I think Disney, I might be getting this wrong, but I think he wanted bathrooms instead of water fountains. So people were like dehydrated. It was kind of a mess opening day. But I think this is what he's referencing is like they didn't even have enough money and like because they were so focused on quality, they wanted to focus on like, what does the castle look like? How do we make that the best thing ever? And then let's move on to other things that they didn't have enough money to finish landscaping. But it shows that Walt Disney was also scrappy. Like he would— he was a pioneer, a creator. He had like— he envisioned this whole land and he wanted it to become a reality. And so he would have like Bill Evans, as he says here, go out and put Latin tags on all the weeds because one, that's still like he's still committed to excellence and two, he wants to make it look like it's good. And three, like this is just being scrappy. It's what every founder needs to do at some point. Now the next thing is Disneyland is like a piece of clay. If there's something I don't like, I'm not stuck with it. I can reshape and revamp. He's talking about like constantly refining. And this is like the idea of every great founder. You have to constantly be refining your business. And why is that? Well, you have to constantly be refining because if you're not, you're going to fall behind, just like Steve Jobs said. The next quote is, "Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved." It's constantly refining. And this is just what Disneyland— like every single day This relates to James Dyson's idea. Everybody should be looking for improvements. And this is also an idea from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. He says, or the idea is that you constantly are analyzing tactics and implement— implementing lessons learned. So it's a really brilliant idea and it makes a lot of sense. The next quote is, we did it in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster. Closed and forgotten within the first year. Now, what is he referencing here? He's talking about Disneyland. Again, the bankers didn't think he would be able to do it. The, like, Roy Disney didn't think he'd be able to do it. People closest around, like his wife, didn't think he'd be able to do it. You have like investors and all these certain people. He had to literally create a different company to just make this happen. And he financed it himself. And then he got some of Disney's money, like the company to actually invest. But he's saying that they thought it'd be a financial disaster. And this is crazy because like most entrepreneurs and most founders, like if you watch Shark Tank, for example, you have some companies that come on and they completely fail. But you have some companies come on, they don't get an offer, and then all of a sudden they're back to like, they're doing super, super well. And this just shows you that the critics are not right. The critics are never right because you could fail, but you could also succeed 10x what they said, or even a lot more. Like critics thought that Walt Disney, even the people closest around to him. They thought that Disneyland would never work. And guess what? It's been like one of the most successful theme parks in history. And there probably wouldn't even be theme parks without Walt Disney pursuing and persist— uh, per— just pursuing this dream. Like, you would probably have— it would probably have gotten better, but you wouldn't even have this. And this is the same pattern with Elon Musk. He says try new ideas and be willing to blow things up. And he's probably talking about spaceships or whatever he's doing right now. But like, be willing to take those risks, be willing to try those new ideas, because if you don't, you would never have known how much money you would have saved. Like what you could have built, all these different things. Like he literally— Elon Musk literally tried the new idea of catching a spaceship, like coming down to the Earth with arms. Like it doesn't have legs anymore. He just catches it like he set up like a stand to catch the spaceship. It's absolutely crazy and it works. The next thing is like Bezos, his habit of chasing moves that look unreasonable to short-term thinkers. Jeff Bezos, like yardstick of quality again and again and again. Like Amazon, make sure you do something that's like really going to help. In the long term. It's all about long term. You like— sometimes you do things that look unreasonable to short-term thinkers, but that's because they are actually short-term. You want to do something that's really pushing it. You want to do something that's better long term and that you know that customers would still be paying for long term. The next quote by Disney: The more I go to other amusement parks in all parts of the world, the more I am convinced of the wisdom of the original concepts of Disneyland. What does this mean? Disney, Walt Disney himself, has created something timeless. He knew it himself. He knew that he had built something that no one in the world could match or rival. It's because that he knew what quality looked like. He had a vision of something that he was going to do, and he did it well. He did it well. And again, this is another thing that he talks about Disneyland. It's something that will never be finished, something that I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to. It's alive. It will be a living, breathing, breathing thing that will need change. So he's saying that it's constantly going to need refinement, improvement. And whenever I've gone to Disneyland, it almost feels like it's stuck back in time, like He's almost created something so timeless that like no one else could replicate the nostalgia that Disney brings you. And it's from the movie, it's, it's from the actual, um, just being in Disneyland, seeing his actual creation, but like they've kept it and they've refined it some, but like they've actually kept it going. And it's one of the greatest nostalgic places to go to because you get to see Disney's living and breathing thing right there. And this goes back to like what we were saying a little bit ago. But James Dyson, he also said something close to this where he was basically saying that if you are building a product, you should never be satisfied. Like you should never be satisfied with just settling and saying it's done because ultimately it's not done. Like you would always like revise it more and more and more. And keep adding to it, keep, you know, making your product the best it can be. There's never, ever a time where you're just like, yeah, it's good now. Like, never a time. There can always be something better and there will always be something to do. You just got to go find it. And this matches— I read this book called Trillion Dollar Coach, and it's, I think, by some of the people that founded Google in the very beginning. And they talked to one of the coaches. He like coached Steve Jobs. He coached all these people, but he had this idea that innovation is where the crazy people have stature and the whole company is in service of a product vision that's never done. Like you're never supposed to settle. Like you always keep going. And I've done this with music. I've done this with my podcast. I've done this with certain products now or certain things I'm doing. Where it's like it's never done. Like when you're building a website, there's always something you could be doing better, whether it's learning, whether it's like there are so many things out in the world right now that you could like look at, solve the problem of, and just constantly refine and make that the best you can possibly be. Next quote from Walt Disney: I don't want the public to see the world they live in while they're in the park. I want them to feel like they're in another world. Now, this is incredible because Disney built Disneyland to make it feel like you were actually in it, like absorbed in it. And I've been to some other places like Universal, all these different things, and you can see outside clearly, like you can see the streets, you can see sometimes. And what makes Disneyland different? He literally planted like trees on the outside I think he put like a soundproof wall. He put certain things, so it actually makes you feel like you're in it. So with the Jungle Cruise ride, for example, he, I think, put a soundproof wall, like a big pile of dirt over the wall, put big trees over by it. And then with the Jungle Cruise ride, he actually imported a lot of plants that were like foreign. He— they did so many things there, but it made you feel like you were actually going down a tropical river. And it's because like all these certain things. They want to make you feel like you're in the world. Another fun fact about Disneyland, whenever you go there, if you ever go there, all of the buildings in Disneyland are 3/4 size. So, um, they're not full size, but you can kind of see the rooftop a little bit. So it makes you feel like you're in a town, like when you're walking down Main Street, it makes you feel like you're kind of in a town when really you're not. And, um, they're actually smaller than normal buildings. So a normal building would be, you know, 4/4. But that building, because Walt Disney was so interested in kind of models and all that stuff, he made basically bigger models. So 3/4, he made the train a certain size. I want to say like 5/8, but don't quote me on that. And there's just so many different things that Walt Disney did that he paid attention to detail and truly it has not been matched since. Like, he, he has done so good. Um, he's done such a good job at like building this whole world he's literally envisioned from his mind or his head. Um, and again, it's like you want them to feel like you're actually in a different world. You don't want to— you don't want them to see the outside. You don't want them— like, you want to absorb them in the product. You want them to almost feel like, like they're there in Disneyland. And it's truly incredible. Now, last one. Disneyland will never be completed as long as there— as long as there is imagination left in the world. So he's kind of saying like Disneyland will never be done. It's never going to be done as long as there's still imagination. And you can see, like with Walt Disney World, with all these different parks, with all these different places that they're adding in different parts of the world, they're always adding to it. And it's truly incredible what Disney has built, like the Disney University, right, where they teach you how to become— basically serve guests in a park. Like you don't call them a user or a customer. You call them a guest and you're like the host. It's truly everything that Disney did was like paying attention to the details. So Disneyland will never be completed as long as there is imagination left in the world. And Walt Disney is truly incredible. This is part 1 of this series. I'm probably going to do another couple episodes on this, at least another one, maybe 2 more. It's truly an incredible book. I would go pick it up if I were you. It's a great book to have on your shelf. It's a really quick and easy read. It's about 370-something pages and they're all just like quotes. So it's really, really good. And Walt Disney is filled with things and quotes that are just truly incredible. And this is the 30th episode of Uncommon Excellence. I really appreciate you guys listening to this, and I'll talk to you guys again soon.