Achieving a breakthrough after a long drought feels amazing. A big cheque after chasing down a client. Recognition. Your efforts vindicated. The whole nine yards.
That’s exactly how Walt Disney felt in February 1928 as he boarded a four-day cross-country train ride with his wife, Lilian, from Los Angeles to New York.
Walt had started his independent animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram Films in 1922 and for years, struggled financially. At some point in 1923, they went bankrupt and he resorted to sleeping on the floor and eating cold beans out of a can.
All that changed in 1927 when they created Oswald the Rabbit, a cartoon character that became an overnight cultural phenomenon.
It was a roaring success and in 1928, the train ride to New York was to convince Charles Mintz, the distributor, to increase the budget for each cartoon from $2,250 to $2,500.
For Disney, this was his efforts being vindicated after so many years of bankruptcy at Kansas city. Universal Pictures wanted in and in his desperation for success, Walt gave them full ownership rights for the character.
“Walt and Lillian boarded the train for New York in February 1928. Walt was in high spirits. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was a certified hit, and Walt felt he was in a position to dictate terms to Charles Mintz. He wanted a budget increase from $2,250 to $2,500 per cartoon. He felt he had earned it.”
However, when he got to New York, the world turned around its head.
Mintz had covertly gone behind his back and poached all his animators, except Ub Iwerks, and demanded a budget cut rather than an increase.
Walt threatened to take Oswald elsewhere and that’s when Mintz dropped the real hammer: Oswald was now fully owned by Universal Pictures.
At that moment, Walt lost everything. His creative team, cartoon character, and income stream. What’s more, he was 3,000 miles away from home.
How do you handle these different emotions while you still need to make progress?
Walt knew the answer.
In that return trip to Los Angeles, Walt and Ub didn’t wallow in despair. Instead, they went back to work, sketching a new character.
“On the three-day train ride back to California, Walt could have wallowed in despair. Instead, he forced his mind to work. He sat in the compartment with Lillian, a sketch pad on his lap. He told her he was going to create a new character. He tried sketching a few animals, but his mind kept returning to a mouse-a specific, spunky little mouse he remembered from his days at the Laugh-O-gram studio in Kansas City.”
The mouse character was initially named Mortimer but Lilian refused it. Mickey Mouse was born.
When Walt stepped off that train, he was holding a handful of rough, imperfect sketches of a cartoon mouse.
He didn't have synchronized sound figured out yet, he didn't have a new distributor, and his studio was still an empty shell. Internally, he was navigating a profound professional trauma but externally, he was clearing the next day's tasks.
Decades later, in 1985, a repeat occurred. This time, it was in Silicon Valley.
Steve Jobs was stripped off his power from Apple, the company he co-founded and poured his entire identity into.
Despite the despair and existential grief, Jobs didn’t wait to feel healed or better. Instead, he poured his energy into NeXT, and invested in what would become Pixar.
“At Apple, Steve had been a corporate titan, the head of a division with hundreds of employees and a hundred-million-dollar advertising budget... Now, at NeXT, he was back in a small, tight circle. He was personally involved in choosing the desks, the color of the office walls, and debating the precise typography of the company stationery.”
Takeaway This Week
This week, we look at the messy reality of when terror and progress must coexist simultaneously.
For Disney and Jobs, the moment they lost what they had worked on was the same one they realized that life wasn’t going to wait for their emotions to normalize. It had to keep moving.
As a knowledge worker, emotional imbalances from your personal life, such as from a breakup, burnout, or a medical emergency, may at times bleed into your professional work and you are unable to make progress.
Your focus will be fragmented and picking up your cursor will feel like lifting concrete.
At that moment, you have two options. You can wait until you are fully healed and recovered or you can recognize that your work routine is the exact scaffolding that pulls you out.
What I realized is that raw willpower hardly works when I am emotionally compromised.
The hardest part is usually the transition into the task I must do, the first ten minutes where your mind keeps sliding back to the thing that hurts.
So, don’t demand that you feel focused. Intentionally lower the bar to only one bounded block: a single 30–45 minute window, one small task, nothing heroic.
The lever I lean on to get into that window is almost embarrassingly simple. I put on a focus track and let it carry the first few minutes for me.
I use Brain.fm for it: music engineered to pull a scattered brain toward a work state, because on the days you can't summon focus yourself, something has to.
You select deep work mode.
And press play on a track with a high neutral effect (works best to get you focused).
You clear one task at a 119% focus state.
This simple routine does what my motivation can't and the grief, still in the room, quietly loses the wheel.
The mantra I adopt is “I am not okay but I need to keep making progress.”
Here are others who tried using it.
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That’s it for now.
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Have a great day :)