I want to tell you about an American original.

A man who saw into the future and made it a reality.

Now, he isn't the only one to do this.

There were American originals before him, Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, John

D. Rockefeller, and there are American originals in our time like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon

Musk.

But in the middle of the 20th century, there was no better example than Walt Disney.

Fifty years after his death, his name still stands atop a global empire.

Raised on a small family farm in Missouri, Walt Disney arrived in Hollywood in 1923 with

little more than a suitcase and a pencil.

But he had something else.

An idea.

An idea to explore humanity's foibles through cartoon animals.

Now I know it sounds obvious now, but only because we live in a world that he helped create.

At first, Disney, like most entrepreneurs, did everything himself.

He wrote, produced, directed, and animated.

An animation is a painstakingly time-intensive task.

In the early days, it would take hundreds if not thousands of separate drawings to create

a moving cartoon.

That hard work was really never a problem for Walt Disney.

Living on baked beans and renting a one-room office for $5 a month, he believed he was

onto something and nobody could convince him otherwise.

...