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The Boundless Imagination of Walt Disney (Throwback)
How Walt Disney Created an Entertainment Empire
Justin Gordon
November 02, 2025
Hey, Justin here, and welcome to Just Go Grind, a newsletter sharing the lessons, tactics, and stories of world-class founders! Today, we’ve got a throwback from the archives about the man, the myth, the legend… Walt Disney!
Few founders have left a mark on the world like Walt Disney.
From a single idea and a few short films in the 1920s, he built a company now worth more than $200 billion, a global force in storytelling, entertainment, and imagination.
What started as sketches of a mouse became a multigenerational empire that defined childhood for millions and reshaped how stories are told.
I’m revisiting this deep dive because Disney’s story is one of unshakable vision, endless reinvention, and refusal to quit when things fell apart.
It’s a reminder of what’s possible when creativity meets persistence and when the dreamer behind the scenes never stops pushing forward.
Here’s the full story of Walt Disney, one of the greatest builders of all time.
Let’s dive in.
Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901.
After spending the first few years of his life in Chicago, he moved to Marceline, Missouri in 1906.
This was a highly influential experience, as his wife later mentioned:
Marceline was the most important part of Walt's life. He didn't live there very long. He lived in Chicago and Kansas City much longer. But there was something about the farm that was very important to him.
Marceline was a place Walt’s brother, Roy, described as “heaven for city kids.”
Their Father, Elias Disney, worked hard, lived modestly, and worshiped devoutly, but also had an impulsive temper—opposite from Walt in nearly every regard.
In 1911, Walt and his family moved again, this time to Kansas City.
It was in Kansas City that Walt was forced to develop a strong work ethic, brought upon him by the crazy schedule of his paper route:
Only nine years old, Walt was nevertheless tethered to the route. On weekdays he would rise early, in the darkness, to get his allotment of fifty papers and deliver them-the first year by foot, the second by bicycle.
He returned home at five-thirty or six, took a short nap, and then woke and ate his breakfast.
Since he received virtually no compensation, for pocket money he delivered medicine for a pharmacy along his route and eventually talked his father into letting him take fifty additional papers to sell for himself at a trolley stop and, when other newsboys evicted him from his curb, on the trolley itself.
After he finished on the trolley, he headed for school, though he never completed the school day. He had to leave a half-hour early to pick up the papers for the afternoon run. At three-thirty the next morning the routine would begin again.
Walt later admitted it had a profound effect on him.
That work ethic was soon applied to drawing and two people encouraged Walt and gave him the confidence in his drawing to take it seriously—his Aunt Maggie, and his elderly neighbor, Doc Sherwood—but Doc’s words lasted Walt a lifetime:
"Don't be afraid to admit your ignorance," Doc Sherwood told him, a philosophy that Walt, who was always inquisitive, said "lasted me a lifetime."
But what Walt remembered most about Doc Sherwood—what he would recount throughout the rest of his life—was the time the doctor asked him to fetch his crayons and tablet and sketch Rupert. The horse was skittish that day. Doc Sherwood had to hold the reins, and Walt had difficulty capturing him.
"The result was pretty terrible," he recalled, "but both the doctor and his wife praised the drawing highly, to my great delight."
The drawing became, in his brother Roy's hyperbolic words, "the highlight of Walt's life."
That encouragement fueled Walt’s obsession:
He had never stopped drawing. In school he propped up his books as a blind so he could draw. He spent hours decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classmates by riffling them to make them move.
One classmate recalled him going to the blackboard and drawing a perfect likeness of Teddy Roosevelt in chalk, while one teacher remembered him drawing flowers during an art assignment and animating them.
Similarly, many years later, a young Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, would hide his obsessive reading habit from teachers in class.
In 1918, at only 16, Walt attempted to join the army, but, being too young, he was rejected. Instead, he joined the Red Cross after forging the date on his birth certificate.
He spent almost a year in France, arriving after the armistice, serving as an ambulance driver.
After returning to Kansas City in October 1919, he was ready to jumpstart his creative career…
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