Walt Disney went bankrupt. At just 20 years old, Walt’s first company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, brought together some of the most talented animators in the world, laid the groundwork for the creation of Mickey Mouse – and was a financial disaster. Before the company went out of business just two short years later, cash was so tight that Walt lived in his office and survived on cold beans from a can and bathed at Union Station because he couldn’t afford hot water. He even resorted to catching mice in his office – one of which inspired Mickey Mouse.

After this devastating failure, Walt moved to Hollywood – with virtually no money, he founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio (which later became the Walt Disney Company). His fortune didn’t improve, and by the early 1930s, the company was $4 million in debt. Against this backdrop, Walt decided to produce Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – production was so expensive that it nearly bankrupted the company again. Hollywood called it “Disney’s Folly.” The film’s $1.5 million budget was astronomical for 1937. Walt mortgaged his house, and animators worked unpaid overtime believing in his vision.

Snow White turned out to be a monumental success: Snow White earned $8 million during its initial release, an astronomical sum in 1937 dollars, making it the highest-grossing film of all time until Gone with the Wind. The rest is, as they say in the movies, history…

It takes a special person with strong convictions to endure so much hardship. And yet – nearly every success story, when you peel back the layers and look closely, resembles Walt’s nightmare fairy tale. Here’s what separates dreamers from builders: When Laugh-O-Gram collapsed, Walt had every reason to return to his father’s farm in Missouri. Instead, he borrowed $40 from his uncle and bought a one-way ticket to Hollywood. Ask yourself: Would you bet everything – your home, your reputation, your last dollar – on something everyone calls a folly? Walt did. Because when you truly believe in what you’re building, bankruptcy is just another problem to solve.

Like it or not – this is reality. It’s the reality that media (typically) doesn’t talk about. Doing something that matters requires, first and foremost, that it actually matters (to YOU) – without conviction that the thing you do is something worth fighting for, you don’t even have a shot at making it. When the going gets tough (and it will, trust me), you need to have a rock-solid foundation of belief – believe that what you do matters.

Build what matters – the rest is just problems waiting for solutions.

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Have you ever noticed how some songs sound loud but strangely lifeless? That’s not just your imagination – it’s the result of over-compression, a trick sound engineers use to make music louder, but at a cost to both quality and, surprisingly, your ears. Compression “squishes” music: loud parts become quieter, quiet parts louder, making everything sound equally loud. This boosts punchiness on small speakers, but strips away nuance and, as new research suggests, may even harm your hearing.

It’s been a hot minute since we last spoke. I didn’t disappear; I just got busy… Busy with radical✦, my advisory firm, busy with building out our bi-weekly Briefing (which you absolutely should subscribe to – two times a week you will get our latest research and insights on the future of technology and business), our free resources (check it out – we make a bunch of our best tools available for free for you), and busy with working on GYSHIDO. Yes, GYSHIDO – the brutally honest, no-BS productivity movement we launched some dozen years ago.

On a sunny, cloudless day in the summer of 2012, I found myself sitting in one of the classically uncomfortable seats at Denver International Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to depart. At 6 feet 4 inches (or 1.96 meters), I am, by most measures, tall. I am also fairly skinny – back in 2012, while training for a series of ultramarathon races, my body fat was down to around 5%, and I weighed around 165 lbs / 75 kilograms. This means that when I encounter people who are as tall as I am, they tend to be heavier – think basketball players, rather than super tall, skinny runners.

There once was a startup. The founders, plagued by a problem they encountered in their own lives, went out into the world to seek a solution. They spoke to countless others who shared their plight, listening intently to their woes and wishes.

With determination in their hearts and fire in their eyes, they returned to their humble garage and began to craft a magical device. Day and night they toiled, fueled by the stories of those they’d met. Their creation grew more wondrous with each passing moon, for it was born from the very essence of the people’s needs.

Dee Hock, the founder of VISA (the world’s largest credit card payment system), was one of the eminent thinkers in management and organizational theory. As a lifelong student of Hock, his work and insights, I came across the following — which I thought about summarizing in my own words but realized that it’s too good to be butchered by me.

On Leadership:

“I used to have sessions with my employees once a week. Anyone could come, and we’d talk about anything on their minds. They always wanted to talk about management. ‘How do you do it?’ ‘What’s the best way?’ So I would ask them, ‘What is the single most fundamental responsibility of a manager?’

There is a fantastic story told by bodybuilding legend Arnold Schwarzenegger:

I’ll always remember the first time someone asked me questions in the gym. It was about their legs. They said they couldn’t grow, and they wanted to know which exercises to add to their routine to hit the thighs. First, I said, “Let’s see your squat.” And they said, “My squats are fantastic. I can squat 405.” They got the weight on their back and lowered it approximately 2 inches, and came back up. That’s when I learned that people have a habit of looking for the next big thing when they haven’t spent any time mastering the simple thing in front of them.

First things first—it has been a while. As you have undoubtedly realized, my Heretic posting schedule has slowed to a crawl. Which doesn’t mean I don’t post—I just happen to post (twice a week) on the radical Briefing. Check it out; you might like it! With this out of the way, let’s talk about GyShiDo.

GyShiDo?

Yes, GyShiDo. The Art of Getting Your Shit Done. 😁

More than a decade ago, Daniel Epstein, Will Butler, and I created—somewhat as a practical joke, but also dead serious—the GyShiDo Manifesto, after realizing that our individual superpowers were simply that we do get things done. I wrote down some principles, registered the domain, launched a website (all in a mad 48-hour GyShiDo …

Are you optimizing your systems? Keeping a tight ship and making sure the trains run on time? Have your OKRs and KPIs been closely tracked?

You might want to rethink this…

Reed Hastings, the uber-successful founder of Netflix (and disruptor of the status quo in the entertainment industry—a true heretic), once remarked:

Most companies overoptimize for efficiency… The nonintuitive thing is that it is better to be managing chaotically if it’s productive and fertile. Think of the standard model as clear, efficient, sanitary, sterile. Our model is messy, chaotic, and fertile. In the long term, fertile will beat sterile.

The Lie of the Entrepreneurial Dream

Ah, the glamorous life of an entrepreneur. Private jets, lavish parties, changing the world in a hoodie. It’s the stuff dreams are made of, right?

Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s a load of crap. The real entrepreneurial journey is less “champaign wishes and caviar dreams” and more “lukewarm coffee and cold sweats at 3am.” It’s a gritty, messy, nightmare-fueled rollercoaster. And you know what? That’s precisely how it should be.

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