#346 How Walt Disney Built Himself

What I learned from rereading Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. 

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(2:00) Disney’s key traits were raw ingenuity combined with sadistic determination.

(3:00) I had spent a lifetime with a frustrated, and often unemployed man, who hated anybody who was successful. 

— Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life by Michael Schumacher. (Founders #242)

(6:00) Disney put excelence before any other consideration.

(11:00) Maybe the most important thing anyone ever said to him: You’re crazy to be a professor she told Ted. What you really want to do is draw. Ted’s notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him. Here was a man who could draw such pictures. He should earn a living doing that. 

— Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones. (Founders #161)

(14:00) A quote about Edwin Land that would apply to Walt Disney too:

Land had learned early on that total engrossment was the best way for him to work. He strongly believed that this kind of concentrated focus could also produce extraordinary results for others. Late in his career, Land recalled that his “whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.”  A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald Fierstein. (Founders #134)

(15:00) My parents objected strenuously, but I finally talked them into letting me join up as a Red Cross ambulance driver. I had to lie about my age, of course. 

In my company was another fellow who had lied about his age to get in. He was regarded as a strange duck, because whenever we had time off and went out on the town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures.

His name was Walt Disney.

Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc. (Founders #293)

(20:00) Walt Disney had big dreams. He had outsized aspirations.

(22:00) A quote from Edwin Land that would apply to Walt Disney too: My motto is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other compa