Fired from a newspaper because he "lacked imagination and had no original ideas"
Walt Disney was born in Chicago 1901, His father’s persistence was one of the most important factors that changed his life. Walt attended drawing class every Saturday in Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, which his father considered as “an education”.
At the end of World War I, Walt quitted high school to join the ambulance driver troops and managed to earn a huge success in drawing and caricature for the U.S Troops. He went home to join the Kansas City Star as an intern in cartoon section. He was rejected. Walt established his business called Laugh-O-Gram, he added $15,000 from investors and sold his cartoon series to Kansas City cinema. As Walt’s staffs were getting ready to work on the series, the company itself was struggling to survive and his only client got bankrupt six months later and only one movie from the series completed, Walt was also bankrupt.
Walt said, “It was good to experience huge failures when you were young.” He left Kansas City with only $40 and joined his brother Roy in California by hoping that he could revive Laugh-O-Gram series in Hollywood. He aired his short comedic news at a cinema in Los Angeles and sold an idea for a film - a tale about Alice in Wonderland to a New York film distributor called Charles Mintz. He received $1,500 per film, this was his great debut. Walt and Roy built their business together;Walt returned with a series about a naughty rabbit named Oswald, the first animal character to appear in a comic. The series was a huge hit, and soon replaced Alice. Disney’s success was finally here. Little did he know that he would lose all his staff members and right over his most important asset: Oswald the Rabbit, which had been given license under Mintz. He was left with small amount of money and an idea.
Mickey Mouse was invented. Walt felt his first “spoken” animation movie would become a sensation and it did. Walt began building his studio from the money he received from Mickey and began to develop more Mickey adventures-such as Donald, Daisy, Pluto, Goofy, and other Disney animals. Walt took a lesson from Oswald the Rabbit and the result was he made the most important business decision when he sold his first Mickey series: he insisted to maintain control over his artistic work and ownership of his characters. At first it was a bitter experience, but in the end it became the most valuable lesson, because it taught him to secure his company.
