WDW Magazine December 2015 - Crowds at WDW | Page 122

Walk Down Walt’s Path
Carl - Cool, cool. Just going through the first couple of chapters in the book, I picked up
something that I didn't even know, that Walt was left-handed.
Jef - Yes.
Carl - What are some other stories or things we don't know about Walt that we ought to know?
Jef - Well, I think first of all and I learned this from reading and researching Walt but I think it's
important to view it through the eyes of students, today's generation. Walt failed more often
than he was actually successful. That story has been lost to history. I think that there's this
perception that Walt just sort of fell out of the gifted and talented and successful, you know, he
came up with this idea and boom, there it was and it sort of just always been there as a result.
Walt went bankrupt. Walt lost his very first successful animated character, Oswald. He was a
rabbit. He had multitudes of obstacles that he had to face and so I think it's really, really
interesting to see that in order to be successful, you have to be willing to fail.
If you're not failing, you simply are not trying enough and I think, for today, the second we fail
then I think that really is the second we give up or even the prospect of failing means we don't
give up because we never even really get started. Walt's life and Walt's history tell us otherwise.
You're going to fail and the challenge is pick yourself up, learn your lesson and keep moving
forward. Even the park teaches us that. I find it ironic that we make such a big deal over July 17th
and obviously, this year we made an even bigger deal than normal because it was the 60th
birthday or the 60th anniversary. Not only did Walt have his failures, opening day was a disaster
and so much so that it's been referred to, for forever by the company, as "Black Sunday".
Rather than staying down, rather than giving up, Walt took a 100% responsibility for the failures
that he knew he was responsible for, he never blamed anyone else, he never blamed anything
else. He took responsibility, he fixed what he could, he ignored what he couldn't and he kept
moving forward. A few months later, they've already welcome their one millionth guest and
attendance was 30% higher than originally projected and spending is 50% higher than originally
projected. Again, pursuing your passions, follow your dreams, trust that crazy idea and if you're
failing, your failure may actually be a really good sign that you're on the right path and closer to
success than you ever could have imagined.
Carl - Yeah. I saw kind of the idea of walking down Walt's path. Can you elaborate on that?