Why Walt?

I thought before I blog about the Farmgirl, I want to write about why Walt Disney was my inspiration for working towards my goals. We didn't just ride the rides and watch the shows when we went to Disney World in March. We walked through a few exhibits telling some of the background of Walt Disney and Disney World. He was raised in a poor, immigrant family. He watched his dad try several different lines of work, including farming, and he watched his dad fail a number of times. Walt and his brother(s) had to help the family out financially by getting jobs when they were young.

Throughout his life, Walt took chance after chance to follow his dream, and he failed a number of times, too. He was even fired by a newspaper editor because "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas." He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland, and the city of Anaheim initially vetoed Walt's plans for the park, thinking it would bring in troublemakers to the city. In spite of all of this, Walt's attitude towards failure is summed up in his quote, “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 never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something.”
(See the following link for lots of examples of people who succeeded after failure www.des.emory.edu/mfp/ef
ficacynotgiveup.html )

Part of the Sparkpeople program, especially in maintenance is to apply what we've learned about setting and reaching goals to new goals in other areas of our lives. I've always been fairly cautious, and I know the regrets I have in life are from when I didn't step out and take a risk...because I was afraid of failure and/or what people would say if I failed. Well, with Walt as my inspiration, I'm hoping that won't be such a be deal anymore. So here's to failure! (Or at least the willingness to take a risk even though failure is a possibility.)