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According to Walt Disney, This is Why You Shouldn’t Fear Failure

All your dreams can come true.

Kyle Chastain
4 min readMar 25, 2021

By the time Walt Disney was twenty-two, he was bankrupt and had a failed animation studio under his belt.

With that kind of failure, most people would give up on their dreams and go find another job — not Walt.

Instead of giving up, he did the only thing he could: he moved west from his home state of Missouri to California in hopes of establishing himself in the film industry.

In Hollywood, Disney found a little success but soon lost the rights to characters he’d created for an unscrupulous producer. He then started the Disney Brothers Studio with his brother, Roy, but he struggled with film distributors who didn’t want to pay him. At one point he lost most of his staff. He suffered a nervous breakdown and almost went bankrupt a second time.

Of course, Disney went on to have monumental successes in film and beyond. When he looked back on his early failures he admitted:

“I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it, I’ve

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Kyle Chastain
Kyle Chastain

Written by Kyle Chastain

On a mission to become a better writer and storyteller | Building my "Insight" newsletter to 10k+ | Create the life you want: https://chastain.substack.com/

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