There are a handful of people who have inspired me more than anyone else. Walt Disney is close to the top of my list, and this post will explain why.
Disney was born into a poor family in Missouri and started drawing at a young age. After apprenticing for one art studio and working for another, he and his friend Ub Iwerks started their own company. A few years later, he moved to California and started Disney Brothers Studios with his brother, Roy (who later changed the company name to Walt Disney Studios). While partnering with Universal Studios, Disney had a falling-out with the company in which he lost his animators and most popular animated character. Rather than giving up, he persevered and ended up creating his most famous character, Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse cartoons helped Disney get back on his feet and gradually move on to larger projects; one of these projects was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was Disney’s first animated film and the first feature-length animated film ever made.
While he didn’t create the first amusement park, Disney was inspired to make his own after taking his daughters to several that were of poor quality and didn’t offer much for families to do together. He couldn’t get approval from his company for such a large and expensive venture, so he started another one and agreed to make a few television shows for ABC in exchange for help financing the park. Despite starting off with enormous technical and mechanic problems that took months to fix, Disneyland eventually became a popular vacation spot for millions of families every year.
Always dreaming bigger, Disney planned to create a place in Florida called EPCOT. While there is a theme park with the same name, his original vision was quite different than the current park. EPCOT would have contained a theme park similar to Disneyland, but that would only be one small part of the project. Disney envisioned an entire planned community where people would live, work, shop, and play. Although he began acquiring the enormous amount of land he needed for such a massive undertaking, years of heavy smoking finally caught up to him and resulted in his death from lung cancer in 1966. Since Disney World didn’t open until 1971 (not to mention the many additions that were added in the following decades), Disney never got to see his greatest dream come to life.
Who would have thought that a man with humble origins would be the driving force behind a successful cartoon studio, movie company, assortment of theme parks and resorts, and numerous innovations in these fields (some of which include audio animatronics and the multiplane camera)? Yet Disney accomplished all that and more in his life. He wasn’t afraid to dream bigger than what was possible at any given moment, and he never gave up on his dreams, choosing instead to aim ever higher as he went on. If he wanted to do something nobody had ever done before, he did his best to find a way to do it, and he always tried to improve things he was already doing. In good times and bad times alike, Disney kept moving forward and changed the world in the process. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately as I’m in the process of pursuing some big dreams of my own, and seeing how much he accomplished is invaluable. He showed that dreams can come true if you keep pursuing them, and that’s why Walt Disney is one of the people I most admire and from whom I draw the most inspiration.