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Founder Traits

Improvements for Traits

Do we want to make it slightly more interactive to make sure they really understand each trait? This might make the workshop even longer but maybe it’s worth pausing halfway after the first 5 essential traits?

I found some additional stories we might want to include/interchange. There is a lot of Walt Disney in here because this episode

How Walt Built Himself Annotated Transcript⁠

had examples of all the traits in there!

Study the greats / Growth Machines

Walt Disney

Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas all idolized Walt Disney. They studied him intently. He had a huge influence on their work.

One of Walt Disney's heroes was Henry Ford. Walt, shortly before Henry Ford dies, goes to Michigan to visit him, and he talked with Ford about the idea for issuing of stock to outside shareholders, and this was Ford’s response: If you sell any of it, you should sell all of it. Walt didn’t sell.

Just Don’t Stop

Walt Disney

Going over drawings for Epcot from the hospital in his last days on this planet.

“His hobby is his work.”

“If his eyes were open, he was working.”

Walt Disney's first studio was a garage in his yard. He'd go to the garage after a full day of work, to continue working. He'd come out for dinner, then go back to the studio. He'd come back inside long after everybody else was in bed. Always drawing, working, experimenting.

There wasn't a night we didn't end up at the studio, his wife recalled. She would curl up on the couch in his office and sleep while Walt worked. She would wake up at different intervals to ask how late it was, to which regardless of the time Walt would answer, oh, it's not that late honey. Walt would turn back his office clock while Lillian slept so that she never knew how late he had worked.

Think Differently

Consider deleting Dyson’s quote from the deck since just the quote is not that powerful.

Walt Disney

He built an entire world because he wasn’t satisfied with the one we lived in

There were 20,000 other small amusement parks in America at the time. Why would you want to build an amusement park? They were dirty and not fun. Many of Disney's favorite projects made no economic sense to anyone familiar with the amusement park business. Things like castles and pirate ships are cute, but they aren't rides, so there's no economic reason to build them. But people didn’t get what Walt wanted to build. What he's really trying to build is much closer to a motion picture than an amusement park. "We don't have customers, we have guests. We're not employees, we're hosts and hostesses. We don't have crowds, we have an audience."

Disney wasn’t designed by architects but by set designers. Disney hired a US Navy admiral to lead the construction of the giant ships and a running river from scratch for the park.

When Disney started putting sound on animated films, everyone in the animation industry criticized it. They said, drawings are not vocal, why should a voice come out of a cartoon character? They said it was unnatural, peculiar and off-putting. Disney ignored everyone, produced the films and previewed them. He put it in front of customers, in front of an audience “I had never seen such a reaction in an audience in my life.” People loved it.

Ford:

“It was not that my employer objected to experiments, only to experiments with a gas engine. I can still hear him saying, 'Electricity, yes. That is the coming thing. But gas, no.” In 1892, no one had the remotest notion of the future of the internal combustion engine. They were just on the edge of the great electrical development. All the energy, the attention, the money, the entrepreneurial energy and spirit is going into electricity. Yet, Ford was able to ignore that distraction and with great independence of mind, focus on internal combustion because he thinks it has a future.

There was no demand for automobiles. No man of money even thought of it as a commercial possibility. In the beginning, there was hardly anyone who sensed that the automobile could be a large factor in industry. The most optimistic people at this time hoped for a development that was akin to the bicycle."

Estee Lauder

On giving away products as an effective form of marketing — "We took the money we had planned to use on advertising and invested instead in enough material to give away large quantities of our products. It was so simple that our competitors sneered when they heard what we were doing. Today, even the banks are copying us." No one was doing this at the time

Full effort, always everywhere

Walt Disney

On the opening day of Disney Land, Walt was having dinner on the patio with another one of his employees watching the fireworks display over the park. His employee noticed that Walt kept taking notes during the show. What was he doing? A stickler for detail, even amid the pandemonium, he was counting the rockets being shut off to confirm that he was getting the full number.

"The thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different is the detail." So if you lose the detail, you lose it all. One of his workers wanted to put on plastic railings up on the top of the houses of a street in Disney, but Walt insisted on real wrought iron. We are talking about railings 40 feet up on the air. Nobody could tell the difference but Walt relentlessly focused on every single detail.

Henry Ford

"Not a single operation is ever considered as being done in the best or cheapest way. Things can always be done better and eventually it will be done better. And why? One cent saved on each part would amount to millions a year. Therefore, in comparing savings, the calculations are carried out to the 1,000th part of a cent. My improvements may be so minuscule that I cannot even calculate them unless I take out my calculations to the 1,000th part of as cent.

If we can save 10 steps a day for each of the 12,000 employees that I have, you will save 50 miles of wasted motion and misspent energy every day."

Risk Taking

Bezos

"Failure and invention are inseparable twins. Amazon will be a place, for the best place in the world to invent. To invent, you have to experiment. And if you know in advance it's going to work, it's not an experiment.”

Walt Disney

Him and his brother, Roy, they put mortgages and second mortgages on their house. Walt sold his car to finance his company.

“I had to mortgage everything I owned, including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and everything else to make Snow White.”

No one wanted Disney to build Disneyland. Not his brother, Roy, who ran the company's finances, not the bankers and not his wife. Amusement parks at the time were a generally despised business. Disney was told that he would only be heading towards financial ruin. He financed the park with his own life insurance and by mortaring his house, again.

Jobs

Jobs also sold his car in the early day of Apple. He was driving like a Volkswagen bus, and had to sell it, so that he can get parts to build their first product.

Audacious

Walt Disney

Disney constantly told his team, “if Disney goes out of business, the quality of the entire animation industry would fall. The quality of the entire animation industry rests on us.” → Bold to place to belief that his company essentially represents the entire industry. Wild that he said it and wild because it's probably true.

High Expectations

Walt Disney

Disney put excellence before any other consideration

If we’re not excellent, we go out of business

“No matter how good a picture we produce, I can always see ways to improve it when I see the finished product.” His animated cartoons, and feature films, won every single award, they made a ton of money. Disney said, “I can't even watch them a decade later because all I see is the mistakes, all I see is what I could do better today.”

Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. Disney built an environment where excellence was expected. The biggest difference between the Disney studio and every other animation studio was not in preparation or specialization. It was an expectation that Walt Disney had to be the best.

If you hire from experience, the problem is, their experience may be several levels below your expectation. He would hire for youthful enthusiasm over experience, and train his people into excellent animators. He winds up starting his own school. They'd work all day, and then at night, they’d attend Disney’s animation classes. Disney himself trained over 1,000 artists.

Walt would not okay any animation that did not meet with his very high standards of acceptance. This meant that everything one did had to be analyzed, endlessly analyzed to make sure it worked, to make sure that it was up to standards, to make sure that it could not be improved upon. “Everything was drawn and redrawn until we could say this is the best that we can do.”

Relentlessly Optimistic

Edwin Land

“If you can state a problem, then you can solve it. From then on it’s just hard work.”

Sam Walton

"In all of my excitement at becoming Sam Walton, the merchant, I had neglected to include a clause in my lease which gave me an option to renew after the first five years. And our success, it turned out, had attracted a lot of attention. My landlord, the department store owner, was so impressed with our Ben Franklin success that he decided not to renew our lease at any price, knowing full well that we had nowhere else in the town to move the store."

I had built the best variety store in the whole region and worked hard in the community. I had done everything right, and now I was being kicked out of town. It didn't seem fair and I was furious at the landlord."

"The lawyer saw Sam clenching and unclenching his fist, staring at his hands. Sam straightened up. 'No,' he said, 'I'm not whipped. I found Newport and I found the store. I can find another good town and another store. Just wait and see." “I did it once. I'll pick myself up. I got knocked down. I'll pick myself up. I'll do it again." This is actually how he winds up in Bentonville, Arkansas where obviously Walmart is still headquartered to this day.

Walt Disney

This is Walt’s situation right before his first “successful” animation: Walt is struggling, he’s about to go bankrupt, he’s basically starving, can’t pay rent so he’s living in his office. To meet payroll and to feed himself, he winds up doing educational films on dental hygiene for a dentist. He has to get his meals on credit. When that credit runs out, Walt would subsist on cold beans from a can. Since he's living in the office, he only takes a bath or a shower once a week at the local YMCA and pays like $0.05 or $0.10, so he can shower there. He's losing so much weight and he looks so bad that everybody around him think he has tuberculosis. But, he's got a bulletproof optimism. Throughout the failures, throughout the days without meals and nights with restless sleep, throughout the constant begging for funds, throughout it all, Walt Disney seemed never to lose his faith. He says, “I'm going to sit tight. I have the greatest opportunity I've ever had, and I'm in it for everything.” He was always optimistic about his ability and the value of his ideas and about the possibilities of cartoons in the entertainment field. Never once did one hear him express anything except determination to go ahead. He seemed confident beyond any logical reason for him to be so. It appeared that nothing could discourage him. At this point, he sells his camera to buy a one way ticket to Hollywood and try and make his film Alice’s Wonderland work. Alice was a big success.

Walt’s initial distributor, Charlie Mintz, led a coup and overthrow Disney out of his own company. He lost ownership of all the characters Walt had designed. Disney had signed a bad deal because in the agreement, Disney had no rights to the characters he had created. He was devastated. They had no money, no staff, no characters. But Walt just kept working. The only thing you can do is get back to work. He's spending the entire time on the train, drawing and sketching and trying to create new characters with the hope he could use those characters as a basis to make more animated cartoons and get back on track. It is on this train ride across the country that he starts drawing a mouse, Mickey Mouse, the most successful character of Disney’s history.

Other notes:

We have good info on “study the greats”

But we don’t much of “growth machines” or “using the world as a classroom” this is sort of weaved into the stories of all other traits though. Common ways in which growth shows up:

Extremely confident that whatever it is they would be able to learn it / figure it out.

Chung learning every new industries from selling rice to construction to cars

Elon with SpaceX

Walt going from cartons to full-length films to creating a park

Everyone just learns whatever they need to learn and also learn from mistakes

Never satisfied with their own skills / their output - it can always be better

The concept of practice - relentless practice

Find examples for these

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