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August 30 - October 4, 2022
for all leaders must have vision for themselves to make it apparent to others.
Walt once said, “Disneyland is the star. Everything else is the supporting role.”
“If you can dream it, you can do it.”
I believe every successful person needs a park bench—that personal place where we can plan, set goals, and allow our imaginations to run wild. Your park bench is any place where you can begin to envision a bigger and better tomorrow. The best gift a leader can give to his life, his family, and his organization is vision. Vision is an extension of the ability to dream. Walt himself said, “Money doesn’t excite me—my ideas excite me.”
You need to treat your dreams like you treat your children. Dreams, like children, don’t raise themselves. Like newborn babies, your dreams, your ideas, your goals, your ambitions, and your visions must be guarded and protected. You wouldn’t leave a young child to sit alone on a park bench and “figure life out” on its own, so why would you do the same with your dreams? You need a plan. A plan for ensuring that your dreams get fed and your goals get nurtured. With the right amount of parenting, any dream, even a dream as big as Disneyland, can mature into reality.
Don’t leave your thoughts, your ideas, your dreams, your goals, your vision—like my sweater— behind on a park bench. Your thoughts matter.
Our best leaders recognize that leadership has nothing to do with position or power. Your followers want to know where you are going to take them. Casting a compelling vision is critical to your success. Your followers need a reason to go where you are going. Leadership is not about managing things as they are today. Leadership is about transforming reality into your vision for a better tomorrow.
This is the power of vision. This is the power of focusing on helping others realize their own dreams and their own goals.
It is always tempting to stay where you are rather than risk taking the chances necessary to grow yourself, grow your company, and expand well beyond your comfort zone.
Being your own hero and stepping onto your steed all begins with your thinking. And your vision. And most importantly, your actions!
“Walt was the grand master of the vision.” — Imagineer Bob Gurr
Big dreams require big canvases.
Walt was a man of passion. He pursued his dreams with persistence, and he trusted that the right results would follow. In turn, he lived an unimaginable life that is the envy of many.
As Steve Jobs, who attended college but never graduated, shared with the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University: …you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
What I’ve come to understand is that finding your purpose is more of a path than a plan: it involves unexpected twists and turns that at times look like accidents but actually are a part of the process.
People are rarely bored by passion.
The story of Disneyland is a success story that, in my opinion, every student should know. It epitomizes what is great about America and sets the excellence bar high.
As a historian, I was ultimately empowered by the words of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “Stop whatever you’re doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?”
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” — Maya Angelou
Passion is about excitement. In Talk Like Ted: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Great Minds, Carmine Gallo defines passion as: “a positive, intense feeling that you experience for something that is profoundly meaningful for you as an individual.”
Live your life with the following motto, and know that your passion is more powerful than your fear: It is easier to tame a zealot than to pump life into a cadaver.
Finding your passion is a process.
Leaders form teams via the transaction of trust. Trust is earned.
We all have an inner voice. And within your inner voice resides your true genius. This is where your true self lives.
Too many people live their lives like they are still riding one of these original attractions. We keep looking for the lead character, a hero, not realizing that we are responsible for our own story. I want to encourage you to live a better story by challenging you to take the lead in your life. Be the hero that you, your family, and your business desperately need.
“Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all.” — Nathan W. Morris, author and filmmaker
“Great stories happen to those who tell them.” — Author Ira Glass
An old Polish Proverb says, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” It is a reminder to keep away from things you want no part
Not only must you face fear and failure, but at some level, you even need to embrace fear and failure.
“Fear is the boss you fight before taking your life to the next level.” — Author Stephen Guise
“Fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life…the great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.” — Donald Miller
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much,but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.” — Benjamin E. Mays
Get out of your head and into the world.
You will be wrong. You will be judged. You will be awful as often as you are awesome. People will know when you mess up.
Life is a contact sport. It’s about engaging with, rather than hiding from the world. You can’t avoid the contact, without also avoiding the life.
What single action can I take today that will replace my assumptions with information?
Engage. Contact. Live.
“Somehow I can’t believe there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four Cs: Curiosity, Confidence, Courage and Constancy and the greatest of these is confidence.”
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we are curious—and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney
“life is composed of lights and shadows and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows.”
Confidence is knowing that you will be okay even when you fail. And you will fail.
You have to make the conscious choice to be courageous. What you desire most exists just beyond your comfort zone.
“What you do every day matters far more than what you do every now and again.” — Author Gretchen Rubin
“It is good to have a failure while you’re young because it teaches you so much. For one thing it makes you aware that such a thing can happen to anybody, and once you’ve lived through the worst, you’re never quite as vulnerable afterward.” — Walt Disney
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” — Oscar Wilde
“I don’t want the public to see the world they live in while they’re in the park (Disneyland). I want them to feel they’re in another world.”
“The berm creates your horizon and helps you define what belongs in your experience and what doesn’t.” — Randy Crane
Building a berm around who we are and where we are going will enable us to bring the focus necessary for achieving any goal or realizing any dream.
“Focus is about saying no.” — Steve Jobs
Leadership and success are wrapped in a variety of layers. One of the most crucial layers lies in your ability to influence people and inspire them to move in a certain direction.
