What's up everyone welcome back to Founders Journal my personal diary as an entrepreneur made public for the world before we hop into today's episode

I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being an amazing audience

Thank you for in our first month back driving 150,000 downloads of this show and thank you for literally the hundreds of emails that have

been sent to my inbox introducing yourself requesting future topics of episodes it has been incredible just to see the momentum around the show and the energy for this type of content

with that I would love to hear from you whether you've written in or not so shoot me an email at Alex at Morning Brew.com at minimum say hi even better would be to introduce yourself and maybe tell me any topics you'd like to see me cover on the show moving forward

but my goal is to go from 150,000 downloads to 300,000 over the next month and by interacting with me and telling others about the show I think we can do it

Now today I'm going to share a story from Robert Eiger the world class CEO of Disney and an important takeaway for entrepreneurs that I have from this incredible story

Let's hop into it

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So I've had the right of a lifetime sitting on my bookshelf for the last few years it is the memoir of Bob Eiger who's been the CEO of Disney for 16 years and he's been part of the company since 1996 three years after I was born

He's considered one of the greatest CEOs of all time and this is a relatively timely episode because Bob just extended his contract as CEO of Disney through 2026

After stepping back into the driver's seat in 2022 because his successor Bob Chapich just wasn't getting the job done so it's a great time to be reading this book and while I'm only about 40 pages in I've already covered this thing with sticky notes and have so many lessons that I want to share with you guys and I want to share the first lesson by sharing Bob Eiger's story that he opens this book with he starts by sharing a sequence of crazy events the week of June 13th 2016

Bob was in China for the 40th time in 18 years and he was visiting the country for the 11th time in just six months now before I say anything else I just want you all to let that sink in 40 times in 18 years and 11 times in six months

Like it just shows the amount of sacrifice that is required no matter what business you're running no matter what industry it's in if you want to build anything of value it takes a ton of hard work I hate hearing about you know it's about working smarter not harder really successful people who add a lot of value to this world both work smart and hard and Bob Eiger is the example of that

and so Bob was in China because he was there to oversee the opening of Shanghai Disneyland which is a project that he had literally been working on for 18 years

this was the biggest project he'd ever been a part of Shanghai Disneyland cost $6 billion to build it was 11 times the size of Disneyland in the US and 14,000 workers lived on the property while working on it

VIPs were getting to Disney on that Monday June 13th 2016 which included board members executives Wall Street analysts and investors

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