The Walt Disney Story A Personal Perspective
Posted by Dexter Nelson: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 (11:10 AM)

The Walt Disney Story - Inspiring Success

The Walt Disney Story is quite possibly one of the greatest success stories of all time, and as we close in on October 1st and the "this day in history" tweets start pouring in, I wanted to offer my a personal perspective.

We hear the lessons learned about perseverance and not giving up, how when one door closes another opens, how losing a job isn't the end, and many other lessons learned from Walt Disney.

No doubt they are all true and inspiring, however for me it was a little different. For me it was a perspective of motive.

One of the things I learned is that people react differently to pressure but generally they move in one of two ways. They will either move towards pleasure, or away from pain.

In business circles, most people are towards pleasure - the type of personality that chases their dream. The do something because they want their dream home, the lifestyle, the car and the boat.

However, I wasn't raised in a business atmosphere. My dad was a cop, (now a teacher's aid), and my mom worked forrestry, and we had a farm. They built their house with their hands and we were brought up in an enivronment. My first jobs were working 12 to 14 hour days in a chicken processing factory during the week, and on weekends loading bails of hay.

Business was the furthest thing from my mind and the "towards pleasure" reasoning was something that was foreign to me. I was the "away from pain" type of person like most everyone else. Those are the "i have bills to pay, a car that gets from point a to point b, gotta get gas and groceries, bill collector, calling" people like me, so when I first heard the story of Walt Disney, I didn't quite understand it.

What I did understand was motive. He was fired from the Kansas City Sta the newspaper he worked at for lack of creativity, then went on to build the most creative business empire anyone has ever seen. Forget that later on he would buy out the newspaper that fired him - I found it really cool that the reason he was fired, was the reason he became successful.

I have a personal motto. "Don't tell me I can't do something, because I'll do it just to spite you." It sounds harsh but when I did take a look at business and started learning, I was constantly told "you can't do it, why don't you get a real job, and on and on." It hardened me, and then I understood Walt Disney a little better.

Being fired for no creativity could have also been a spark of undeclared defiance, and in the back of my mind I can imagine they day he was fired, that he was thinking to himself, "no creativity huh? You have no idea what's coming!"

I know it's a bit unusual and not a popular perspective among those I've told, but I think harsh reality is that more people are driven to succeed after a perceived failure, and it's in every human to prove wrong those that accuse us and pass judgement.