#31 How Walt Disney Thought (Part 2)
26 May 2026 · 43 min
Liam Applegate reads 70-80 pages of Walt Disney quotes and pairs them with modern leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk to extract twelve leadership principles. Disney rejected luck, treated his organization like an orchestra, embedded relentless quality, and saw money as a tool for reinvestment rather than an end goal.
Chapters
So welcome back to part 2 of this episode. We're basically doing part 2 on Disney and his ideas and quotes. So I went through in part 1 just basically like the first 100 pages of just like the best quotes from Disney. And in this episode today, we're going to be going through another like 70 to 80 pages, but basically it's like a quote or 2 quotes per page. And I really just want to run through these because there's so much wisdom in what Disney is saying, even though sometimes he doesn't follow it or the Disney company didn't follow it. There's actually a lot of wisdom in what he's saying. And I really want to just go through this because there's so many good things in this episode. So let's start with our first quote. A man should never neglect his family for business. This is a really good Disney quote because he's, he's saying that you shouldn't, as a man, like let's say you're running a business like Disney was, never neglect your family. That's something that if we look at many founders and entrepreneurs, sometimes they can run into that trap of doing that where they neglect their family, they get a divorce or their kid, they aren't as close with their kids as they are with the people they work with. So I think it's really important. And Jocko Willink has a similar idea of how do you have a good work-life balance? Well, Jocko Willink says build a disciplined schedule, work hard, spend quality time with your family, friends, and the most important people in your life. So he emphasizes spending quality time with your family, your friends, the important people in your life. So you should build a disciplined schedule. The next quote from Disney is, "I reject luck. I feel every person creates his own determinism by discovering his best aptitudes and following them undividingly." This is just a great quote because he's rejecting this idea of just you, you go around and there's this idea of karma or luck, or you basically just work hard and things will follow. Like if you just work hard at the things that you do best at, or you're following your passions, that the money will follow, things will follow. And so Peter Thiel has a similar idea. He says a startup begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of chance. Chance relating to luck here. You are not a lottery ticket. Peter Thiel is saying this. Peter Thiel is— he authored Zero to One, really great entrepreneur, investor, founder. He started PayPal, so he, he net worth of billions of billions of dollars. Even he is saying that you are not a lottery ticket and you can't just leave it up to chance or luck. You can strategically think through these things where you can follow it undividingly. Naval Ravikant, a legendary investor, AngelList, He invested into Tesla, all these different companies. He said, become the best at what you do. Opportunity will seek you out. Pharrell Williams, actually Pharrell, he actually says the same thing. He says, he says that if you do the best you like, if you have talent and if you do what you do, people will find you. It's just a matter of time. Keep doing what you're doing and the time, even if it takes 5 to 10 years, people will eventually find you and it will, it will be amazing. Disney is hitting on this amazing idea that he probably said 50, 60 years ago, which is incredible and something that we need to be listening to because this is something that people just leave it up to luck or chance or maybe at some point I'll get a job. Like, no, just go get the job right now, or do it now, or prepare yourself now in order to reach, to, uh, to reach that level. Um, the next one, I think if there's any part I've played, the vital part is coordinating these talents and encouraging these talents and carrying them down a certain line. It's like pulling together a big orchestra, but they all need to be to be pulled together, and that's my job. This is what Walt Disney was saying. He was saying that his part is that he is coordinating all these people. He's coordinating the animators, the teams behind what made Disney great, the movies, the Disneyland itself, like all these different places and people and companies that he's put together. It's like a big orchestra. I love the idea of him using a music analogy here because he's putting together, it's like, He's putting together the violinist, he's putting together all these different people, but they all need to be pulled together. And that was what Walt Disney did. It's an emphasis on like hiring people well or hiring the right people for your company, doing that well, because if you don't hire well, eventually your company's going to fall apart. And if you don't hire well, it's truly— it shows a lot. About your company. And so this guy, um, called the Trillion Dollar Coach, or Bill Campbell, he said that there is another equally critical factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed, obsessed with what's good for the company. So the idea here is that You want your company, the people in your company to be obsessed. You want them to be obsessed about what they are doing. Bill Walsh, great teams have a conscious and at its best, an organization bespeaks values in a way of doing things that emanate from the source. And the source is you, the leader and the founder. So the commonality between all these is that one, hiring is the most important thing you can do in your company. Brad Jacobs talks about this. A lot of founders talk about this. If you do, if you can't hire well, you're not going to be successful. But if you can and you can pull together like an orchestra, like what Walt Disney did, pulling together people, you will succeed and you need to hire the right people. Don't be scared to pay them a certain price. You need to be able to do, you need to be able to pay people well and to bring in the right talent and the best talent. And Bill Campbell and Bill Walsh know the exact, like, that is what you do. You need to build a community, you need to build things, you need to have everyone you're hiring to have a collective interest in the company to make sense. Like, all right, We care about what's good for the company, not just, oh, I'm getting a paycheck. It's actually I care about the company and where it goes, not I'm getting a paycheck, so I'll just do the bare minimum. That will destroy and erode your, your whole company. You want to have A players. B players are fine because they can be trained into A players, but never under any circumstance hire a C player. Never hire a C player because it will erode and basically waste away your talents, the talents of your A and B players. And eventually it will get up to the higher levels like the CEO and founder when no one really cares about what you're doing. It really erodes everything you're working on. And again, Bill Walsh, what is he saying here? He's saying that it all emanates from one source. What is that source? Well, the source is you as a leader. As a founder, you got to understand that if you're founding a company, right, and you are starting to hire people, this is the most critical thing. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, they both— Elon Musk sat down for like the first 3,000 hires of like SpaceX and he literally just went like person after person after person. So it's like the idea is that you need to bring your A-game and if you don't, you're not going to be on my team. That's what Elon Musk's philosophy was. So what's the idea, right? The idea is that you can bring your A-game level, right? And that's what Elon Musk would say. Now, Steve Jobs, same thing. You got to basically show up every single day and the hiring process is the most critical. And that's just something I want to hone in on because this is what Walt Disney believed, what Steve Jobs believed, and what Like most of these people, like Bill Walsh, who was the leader or the head coach of Joe Montana's team, the San Francisco 49ers, and they won like 3 to 4 Super Bowl championships. So this isn't just a principle between business founders. This is a core principle that helps a lot of people succeed when they know how to do it right. The next one, I am not the perfectionist anymore. It's my staff. They're the ones always insisting on doing something better and better. What's the idea behind this? I'm not the perfectionist. Like you want your team to be so good, to be so obsessed with what you're doing that they're more obsessed than you on the quality. Like you want them to be better with the quality. So you want your staff to be the perfectionist. Like, no, actually we gotta do this better. Or no, I see an imperfection there. I'm gonna do that better. Not just living paycheck to paycheck saying, well, it's good enough. Like, that will destroy your company. Neal Gabler, who wrote a biography on Walt Disney, he said that part of Walt's secret was that in insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required, he inspired commitment. So let's read this again. Part of Walt's secret was that in insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required, he inspired commitment. So if you can at least get people that have never been trained to spot quality, if you can get them to at least commit, like, all right, I am committed to spotting quality even if I'm not the best of it, or if it's never been required from me, I will try to push myself to commit to that. That's what you want to do. And Brad Jacobs basically says a similar thing. He says, the success of any company depends on its people fulfilling their obligations. Everyone must do what they say they'll do. What does this mean? And what does this look like, right? The success of your company depends on people like fulfilling what they say they're going to do. If they told you they were going to do it, they have to do it. That's a non-negotiable. Like, the people that you hire and what they do, the quality and commitment— if they say they're going to do something, they better do it. And that's just a general principle that even Brad Jacobs, who's started like, I want to say, $7 billion companies or 8, like, separate billion-dollar companies, they all have that core principle. The next Disney quote is, of all the things I've done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal. So again, this whole section is about people, right? People. What he's saying is that the most vital, the, like, the people that work with me, I need to be aiming their efforts at a certain goal. And Bill Walsh says, in building and maintaining your organization, place a premium on those who exhibit great desire to keep pushing themselves to higher and higher performance and production levels. What is What is placing a premium on people who are like, they have a huge ambition to keep pushing themselves? What does that mean in your company? If you have someone like that, it means paying them well, incentives. It means keeping them on so that they don't think about, oh, maybe I should jump ship to a different company, right? It means that they should stay on and that you're actually it makes sense for them to stay on. Trillion Dollar Coaching and Bill Campbell says, love the founders, hold a special reverence for and protect the people with the most vision and passion for the company. He's saying with the, the people with the most vision and passion are not always just the founders. They can be. And those are the people that have that, that the vision and the passion. There's something that Someone says it's a legendary founder, I'm forgetting his name, but he says something that the CEO or the founder is the guardian of the company's soul, right? He's more than just, oh, he's making a company to make money. It's that he actually has a vision and a passion. He created that company to solve people's problems. So he has a passion for that, or you should have a passion for the business you're going to start. Right? And so people in your company need to also have that vision and the passion, or not necessarily vision, but mostly just passion. You need to have that passion for the company that you're working in. Another thing Disney says, and this is probably one of the best quotes, um, that I've read in the book: anything that has a Disney name to it is something we feel responsible for. What he's saying here is that you basically— the quality, like, our name is a brand. Our, like, everything that you associate with our name is a brand. And so if there's something like if merch isn't done right or if a film is terrible or if things are done wrong and it has the Disney name on it, that's something that Disney said that, like, we feel responsible for that because that's our name, that's our company. We take responsibility for that. And Isidore Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, he says, "All businesses proceeds on belief. Trying to run a company without a set of beliefs is like trying to steer a ship without a rudder." Right? So all businesses proceed on belief. So if you believe in your company, and Four Seasons is probably the next greatest example of this compared to Disney, if you believe in what you're doing, your name has a high value. The reputation of that name has a high value. So there's things that you're doing in your company that every time you do it, if it's a bad thing for your company, it's lowering your reputation or lowering things that you're doing. You want to have belief in your company so much that you're saying what Disney is saying, where it's like, no, we actually feel responsible. Like, we want to make it the best product it is because our name's on it. Our name is on that product, so we need to make it the best it can possibly be. That's what Disney is saying. And he says, most of my life I've done what I've wanted to do. I've had fun on the job. I've never been able to confine that fun to office hours. What is he saying in this one? Well, most of my life I've done what I wanted to do. So he is currently like, he has fun when he does his job. And he's never been able to confine that to just normal office hours, normal 9 to 5. It's like you can be working late at night, through the night. You could be working in the morning, early morning, any time of the day. What Walt is saying, that he's saying that passion overthrows the normal office hours. It overthrows the idea of like, I'm just going to go to work here and to this point. He's actually saying that Basically, you should have so much passion, passion for your job that it isn't confined to a short constriction. You're actually like going out and doing great things because you love it. And Ward Kimball, on Walt, who wrote a book on Walt, he said he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of. So what is that? Passion. It's passion he could have fun with or be proud of. You want to make something that, one, you're passionate about, and two, that you can be proud of. And three, you should never be doing it for money. You should never be doing it to be like a big star or to make a ton of money. You should do it because you actually enjoy the product. You could be using it yourself as a founder or as someone who works in the company. You actually enjoy it. Now, the next thing that is somewhat similar, Steve Jobs says he emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last. Again, it's the same idea reiterated through all these different founders of companies, through all these different people, CEOs, all these different people who are successful throughout history. It's not about the money. It's about creating something that will last and something you believe in and something you have passion in. Right now, we kind of move into the idea from Walt about competition, right? And not just competition, but like troubles and hardships in your life. Like when you have hardships in your life, what do you do? He said, I've been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it. So Darren Hardy, um, who's an author of a book, he has a similar idea. He says, enemies give us a reason to stand tall with courage. Without a motivating fight, we can become fat and lazy. This is the same idea of resting on our laurels, right? Um, which we talked about in the last episode. He said, we lose our strength and purpose. So do not rest on your laurels. The moral of that is you do— you should not be resting on your laurels. You should be constantly innovating, constantly getting better. And competition actually pushes us to do that. And Disney is saying he wouldn't know how to do— he wouldn't know how to get along with his business without competition. Competition is a part of our great society and a great part of the world. Bill Walsh said pursuing your ambitions can be grueling and hazardous. The ability to survive and overcome is a fundamental difference between winners and losers. So the ability to pursue your ambitions, even through the idea of like having tough competition and all these hazardous and grueling expeditions that you might be going on in your business or whatever you're doing, that's actually a good thing. Like you should embrace that. And that goes into the next quote that Disney said. All the adversity I've had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles have strengthened me. And this is a great quote because Brad Jacobs kind of adds to this. He says, embrace everything that comes your way, the good and especially the bad. And don't just accept adversity, figure out how to capitalize on it. So he is— Walt Disney is saying, that all the adversity he's had on his life has strengthened him. But, and Brad Jacobs is saying, don't just accept that adversity, actually capitalize on it, be strengthened off of it. Napoleon Hill, the turning point in the lives of those who succeed usually comes at the moment of some crisis. If you have that adversity, you have that crisis, you have something pressing against you, which believe me, every founder of every company or anyone who is in a startup environment or is in any company, you will feel, even if it's in your personal life, you're going to feel that moment of crisis. And for the ones who turn around and they actually turn off that crisis, those are the ones who are going to be able to succeed, whether it's in a business, whether it's in your personal life, wherever that is, you should be able to succeed. And a good like business reminder of this is actually Elon Musk. And what's nice about this is that he started SpaceX, and back when he started it, he was like a, you know, he had thrown, uh, well, he, he had put in a good amount of money, basically most of his money. I think he put in $100 million for SpaceX, $100 million for Tesla. And so he was trying to make SpaceX rockets the cheapest they could be. And so he, they had sent up one rocket, it crashed, they sent up another rocket or it blew up, something like that. Both blew up. And then I think on the third or fourth, I think the third might have blown up or the fourth one, it eventually succeeded. But the moral of that is that if you, if he wouldn't have succeeded, he wouldn't have a billion-dollar company or close to whatever it's at now. Like, you gotta keep taking risks and you gotta, like, you're always gonna have adversity, but the key is how are you gonna move past that? How are you gonna move forward? And Elon Musk is just a great reminder of that, which Disney points out. And basically Disney goes on to say, you may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you. The best thing in the world for you may be a kick in the teeth, like a wake-up, right? Napoleon Hill says, "Opportunity has a sly habit of slipping in by the back door, and often it comes disguised in the form of a misfortune or temporary defeat." This is really interesting because opportunity has a habit, right? So another way to think about this is Charlie Munger has this quote. Basically, essentially what it's, what he's saying is that you're gonna have opportunities and they might, they might not look like opportunities, but when you have that wake-up call, um, you should take that opportunity. Um, because there's always gonna be adversity and always gonna be something, um, to cause you, uh, to push into and having those trials, you're always gonna have those trials. It just depends on what is your reaction to that? Are you gonna seize the opportunity or are you you want to let it slip. Another quote from Disney: I think it's important to have a good hard failure when you're young. Because of it, I've never had any fear in my whole life when we're— when we've been near collapse. Stephen Bartlett says something that it can take away your network, it can take away your resources, it can even impact your reputation, but it can never remove your knowledge and it can never unlearn your skills. What Disney and Stephen Bartlett are essentially saying are— Bartlett, he's saying that you have a set of knowledge, you have a set of skills that you can use. Same thing with Disney. Disney was like, you need to be failing when you're younger because you might lose some more resources. You might lose some people in your network. Your business might fail, but you can always try again and again. Especially when you're young. And because of that, Walt Disney never had any fear in his whole life when they've been near collapse for his companies. And it's been many times that that has happened. Another quote: It is good to have a failure while you're young because it teaches you so much. Once you've lived through the worst, you're never quite as vulnerable afterward. It's a great reminder because it's again, this whole section is about failure. You need to fail when you're young, and failure and risk-taking at any point of life is good. It depends on your mindset. What's your mindset towards that? But when you're young, it teaches you so much. And like Disney said, once you've lived through the worst, you're never quite as vulnerable. When you go through trials, you always gain experience. You always gain that, and you're never as vulnerable, hopefully, afterwards. David Goggins said, because David Goggins, I read his book, he had a tough life. But he said, by the time I graduated, I knew that the confidence I had managed to develop didn't come from a perfect family or God-given talent. It came from personal accountability and self-respect will always light a way forward. He's saying that you need to have personal accountability to, and the right mindset to basically go into hard situations. Think and Grow Rich, which is a book by Napoleon Hill. He said, every person who wins must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. This again reminds me of Elon Musk because the whole principle is that you're going full force into the idea that you're going into, right? You're— you should be willing to fail. And when you fail, you fail hard so you can learn off of that. And every person who wins must be willing to burn his ships. Just like Napoleon Hill said, you must be willing to burn those ships and cut all sources of retreat. Another idea is get a good idea and stay with it, dog it and work at it until it's done and done right. The idea behind this is you need to work hard. If you get a good idea, you need to stay with it. You got to keep going and persisting until you get there. And Bill Walsh, has this great quote. He says, however, a resolute and resourceful leader intelligently and relentless— relentlessly seeks solutions. And when you do that, the score will take care of itself. The score will take care of itself. That, that's a beautiful line because the score taking care of itself means that you don't need to look at it. You aren't doing it for the score. You're doing it to win. And basically what both are saying is, You need to make the product as good as possible. When you find a good idea, a good product, you need to make it as good as possible and let it speak for itself. It's incredible because Elon Musk does the same thing. He's like, I'd rather make a really good product and have it speak for itself rather than hire— get a mediocre product and hire people to sell it for me. So the whole idea is that you're actually doing great things with that product. The next Disney quote is, "To some people, I am kind of a Merlin who takes lots of crazy chances but rarely makes mistakes. I've made some bad ones, but fortunately the successes have come along fast enough to cover up the mistakes. When you go to bat as many times as I do, you're bound to get a good average." I really like what he's saying here because he's talking about taking crazy chances, taking risks. Now, not only is he taking risks, but he's also— he is making mistakes. But what is the key here? The key is that he's going fast enough to cover up the mistakes. So Elon Musk makes a ton of mistakes in his company, and he probably— he probably does. He probably doesn't. But the idea is that they're so fast that he wants you to fail. He wants you to fail forward. So when you fail, you're going so fast that you're covering up those mistakes because you're so far ahead of the competition. So you're going fast enough to cover those mistakes. And I love what Disney ends with because he's saying, when you go to bat as many times as I do, you're bound to get a good average. So if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, or you keep going to bat to hit the ball over and over again, you're bound to at least hit it and to get a good average. And Michael Jordan says, anything can happen if you're willing to put in the work and remain open to the possibility. Dreams are realized by effort, determination, and passion. He's saying the same thing. Anything can happen. You can do great work. You can, um, if you remain open to the possibility that once you start hitting the ball, or you shoot the shot 10,000 times, you're going to hit it and you're going to be great, right? Dreams are realized by effort, determination, and passion. Now, people— this is the next quote— people often ask me if I know the secret of success and I could tell others how to make their dreams come true. My answer is you do it by working. So the goal is that you're— you shouldn't ask people, you shouldn't ask people what, like, what, what is your secret of success? Like, best question you should say is what led you or what got you to this success? But besides that, you should just be doing the work. You should just be doing the work you have, right? And then the next quote from Walt Disney, he said, we evolved by necessity. We did not sit down and say to ourselves, how can we make a big pile of dough? It just happened. So you do you. So the mark of a great company is its ability to innovate. So once you innovate, you're evolving by necessity. You have to innovate because of the competition. Now, when you do that, you need to sit down, right? You're not just sitting down and saying, how can we make a bunch of money? You want to make a great product with great quality. That's what Walt Disney did with Disneyland. You're doing it by necessity. You're doing it because all the other competition sucks and you need to do great work, right? And so your goal is to do great work. And so you're not focused on the money. It's that how can we make a great product that will solve people's problems and the problems that they have in life, right? And the results will follow. Like he said, it just happened. Now, the next thing is, I function better when things are going badly than when they're as smooth as whipped cream. This is a really funny quote and a really good quote because Elon Musk has something similar. He says, inevitably, the process of running a business will test your bias towards hope or fear. So the idea behind business is that it's going to test you and that you should be comfortable under pressure. Jocko Willink, um, in his book Extreme Ownership, says in order to succeed, leaders must be comfortable under pressure and act on logic, not emotion. So the idea is that in order to succeed, one, you need to be comfortable under pressure. Things are eventually going to go bad and they're going to go badly pretty quick, or they're just going to go badly and you need to be prepared. But you need to be able to function under the pressure of when everyone's looking at you in a company or if you're in a high position of leadership. To take that on and do it well, right? And you should be able to function better under that, under the pressure than under when it's just going smooth. Because the reality is, if your business is just smooth, then like the whole way there, you're probably not doing much, right? And Elon Musk said the process of running a business will test your bias towards hope or fear. Are you going to be fearful? And run away from the trials and the anxiety and all the things that come at you? Or are you going to have hope and conquer it? Walt Disney says, "I suppose my formula might be dream, diversify, and never miss an angle." Dream, right? Dream big, have big ambitions, diversify, go over certain like portfolios. So he was in the film, he did Disneyland, he did all these different things and never miss an angle. Never skip out on the details. Patrick Bet-David has this great line. He says, "The only thing separating us from greatness is a vision and a plan for achieving greatness." This is a great quote because vision matches up with dream, right? When you have a vision of something and you have big ambitions, you will know the vision, you will know the path, and that, like, that will lead you to have a plan for achieving greatness. Another quote from Disney, "Money isn't everything." It may not actually be the root of all evil, but it can't buy peace, contentment, or happiness. This is really interesting because he was one of the most successful men. Well, his company was one of the most successful companies in history, you know, $300 to $400 billion net worth. And it's really interesting that he is saying money isn't everything. It may not actually be the root of all evil, but it can't buy peace, contentment, or happiness. Where does that come from? It comes from your family. It comes from purpose. It comes from your company, like building great products, not just the money. Money isn't everything. The next quote is, and this is kind of going into a section about money. This was a huge section that Disney talked a lot about. And the whole idea is that money, he just goes into what he's learned about money. So he says, you reach a point where you don't work for money. This is a really interesting quote because this is kind of something similar to what he said previously, but you reach a point where you don't work for money. Naval Ravikant has a similar line. He says, "If you don't own a piece of a business, you don't have a path towards financial freedom." So, the idea is that Walt Disney, he's reaching a point where he doesn't work for money, but that's because he has financial freedom and financial freedom is what Naval Ravikant talks about, and the whole thesis of it, or the idea of it, is that money is used as a means and not the end. The end is to be financially free, to work on the things you want to work on, to build great products, to change people's lives. You don't work for the money. You're not a slave to the money. The idea is that you're having financial freedom. And Charlie Munger has the same thing. He says, I had a considerable passion to get rich. But why was that? I wanted the independence. Financial freedom equals independence. You can build the products, you can change people's lives, and that will— the money will follow, right? So the idea is that you're not working for the money. This is just a timeless maxim from Naval, Charlie Munger, and Walt Disney all together and all combined. Again, going along with the theme of money. When I make a profit, I don't squander it or hide it away. I immediately plow it back into a fresh project. I regard money merely as a medium for financing new ideas, ideas that excite me. The thing is, Walt Disney had this idea, and this is what MrBeast basically took from him. I don't know from him per se, but he took this idea in general. And the idea is that you are plowing the money that you make from what you're doing. So like if you make money on a film, right, let's say Walt Disney made money on a film, he would plow that back into another movie. The whole idea is that, and this is what MrBeast does with his YouTube channel, he takes the money from a video and he just reinvests it. And he keep— he kept on doing that until now. He's the biggest YouTuber ever. And the thing is, money isn't always the answer. And he— Mr. Bezos actually says creativity is, but what Walt Disney was saying is when I make a profit, I don't squander it or hide it. He doesn't take it for himself, or he doesn't just spend it randomly. He actually plows it back into that fresh project or something that he's working on that will increase the endeavors of the company. He says he regards money merely as a medium for financing new ideas. He— the, the thesis or the idea behind this is that money is a means. Money is a means to finance new ideas, to build new companies, to build, to make projects, to do everything that you want to do. And ideas excite Walt Disney, or they excited Walt Disney. For you, it's the same idea, right? The money is a means, but the end is financial freedom and to be able to build great and amazing things. And Walt actually keeps on going with this. He says, I've always been bored with just making money. I've wanted to do things. I wanted to build things, to get something going. What money meant to me was that I was able to get money to do that for me. So the idea is that money is a means, not the end. The end is to build things, to create things, to, to do like he built Walt Disney or he built Disney World. He built the Walt Disney brand. He built all these things. And so that is the goal. The goal is not to make money because even someone like Walt Disney who made hundreds of millions of dollars probably within his lifetime, he's even saying, I've always been bored with just making money. Money was able to accomplish the means of building those new ideas and to really do what he, what really excited him. The next quote is, today we are shapers of the world of tomorrow. And it's really funny. He has a Tomorrowland in Disneyland. Which is really interesting because he's saying here, today we are shapers of the world of tomorrow. And again, Disney is saying times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future. Right now, today, we are shaping the world of like of tomorrow, of future generations of people. Today we are doing that. So We need to be constantly innovating. We need to be constantly bringing new ideas because if we don't, times change so rapidly that your company or whatever you're doing is going to basically fall into the past. We must keep our aim constantly focused on the future. Jeff Bezos had this litmus test for his company and he was saying for Amazon, he was saying that what in 10 years would a customer still be paying for or still be using our service for? Well, they would definitely be paying for free shipping and great products. And free shipping is great. People would be paying for that and low prices. They would be paying for that all the time. Now, the idea is that you want to be shaping tomorrow. You want to be thinking 10 years in advance when you do that. Another quote from Disney is, What is written on that enormity of youthful minds will alter the course of the world. This is how history is determined. He's saying that youthful minds— and this is what all these companies do nowadays, especially these big movie companies— they're trying to figure out what, um, what are the youth, what are the young people of our nation or of our world, of different cultures, what are they thinking of, um, and what, um, what can we use to really write on their minds, because whatever is written on the youthful minds will alter the course of the world. This is how history is determined. This is what Walt is saying, right? The young people have such an influence over the world that they need to be very careful because there's a lot of people out there now trying to gain their attention or do certain things when really they're some of the most prized people in the world. They have so much power and yet they don't realize it. Youthful minds will alter the course of the world, and this is how history is determined. That is what Walt said. Another thing is part of the Disney success is our ability to create a believable world of dreams that appeals to all age groups, meant to appeal to every member of the family. His idea here is that he didn't want just— and he mentioned this a lot over and over again. He was like, this is not just for kids. We're not just telling or showing fairy tales for kids, we're actually showing a world where you can feel nostalgia if you're an adult or you're entering into something great if you're a kid or if you're middle-aged. Like the Walt Disney brand has aged really, really well, especially in Disneyland and places like that where Walt Disney had a truly incredible dream and he made it nostalgic for everyone who's like watching the older movies or going to Disneyland or things like that where he truly made it nostalgic. And this relates to the idea that Daniel Priestley said in his book Oversubscribed. And he said, you must start to build your own group of loyal fans, make them part of something special. This is what Walt Disney did exactly. Simon Sinek, the goal of business should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe. The whole idea is that you're focusing, you're focusing on— you want to build a group of loyal fans and people who believe in what you believe. And Walt Disney had an incredible vision for that. He said, it's a mistake not to give people a chance to learn to depend on themselves while they are young. You got to let these people depend on themselves when they are younger. The last quote of today's episode, "The important thing is the family. If you can keep the family together, and that's the backbone of our whole business catering to families, that's what we hope to do." And again, it relates very to the first start or to the first start of the episode. Disney said, "A man should never neglect his family for business." The core idea from Disney is that one, he didn't want to neglect his family for business. Two, his company served families like in their films. Disneyland also served families just through the, like what they built. There's so many things. And if I could summarize Walt Disney's single kind of maxim or just idea from his life, it's that The important thing is the family. The important thing that he was catering to or to building an— like his audience was the family and that's what he was building. Those were the people he was building for. So thank you for listening to today's episode. I will be making at least another episode or two of this and I'll talk to you guys again soon.

