Entrepreneurial Traits : Failure is an Option

                                         

Walter Elias Disney or better known as Walt Disney (December 5, 1901- December 15, 1966) was an American entrepreneur, cartoonist, animator, voice actor and film producer. Not everything that he tried was met with immediate success. Before he built the empire that he has today, he had failed several times. Rejection is nothing to him.

      Disney Walt, one of the most creative geniuses of the 20^th century, was fired by his boss from the Kansas City Star Newspaper because he was told he lacked creativity and had no good ideas. That was not his last failure. In 1921, he formed Laugh-O-Gram Films an animation company.  Walt Disney was able to raise $15,000 for the company by using his natural salesmanship abilities. Later, he drove into bankruptcy because the distribution company in New York where he made a deal with went out of business. As a result he was forced to shut down his company. He could barely pay his rent and he survived by eating dog food.

      Broke but not defeated, Walt Disney created Oswald the Rabbit. When he attempted to negotiate with Universal Studio, the distributor, for better rates for each cartoon, he found out that Universal Studio had patented Oswald the Rabbit character and hired his artist out from under him.

      His troubles were not over. Once again he faced failure. Walt Disney created a new cartoon character based on a mouse that had lived in his office in Kansas City. ‘Mice gathered in my wastebasket when I worked late at night. One of them was my particular friend’ said Walt Disney. However, he was told that Mickey Mouse would fail because the mouse would terrify women. As if that was not enough, The Three Little Pigs was rejected because it needed more characters while Pinocchio was shut down during production.

      Walt Disney road to success was full of failure. These are example of failure faced by him. Instead of giving up, he learnt from failure and continues to take risk. He faced criticism and failure before his films started to skyrocket in popularity.