Walt Disney

Walt Disney was fired from an early newspaper job for, according to his editor, lacking imagination and having no good ideas, a judgment that reads strangely in hindsight given everything that followed. He and a business partner started an animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram, in Kansas City, which went bankrupt within a few years, leaving Disney reportedly so broke he could not always afford meals, a genuine, complete business failure before he had built anything close to what would follow.

Disney moved to Hollywood and rebuilt, but faced another devastating loss when a distributor manipulated a contract to take control of his early successful character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, along with most of his animation staff, out from under him entirely. Rather than fight a losing legal battle, Disney and his remaining team created a new character to replace what he'd lost, a mouse originally named Mortimer before his wife suggested the less formal name Mickey.

Mickey Mouse and the studio's subsequent innovations, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, the first full-length cel-animated feature film, a project many in the industry mocked in advance as "Disney's Folly," built an entertainment empire that would eventually include theme parks, television, and one of the most recognized brands in the world. Disney personally held 22 competitive Academy Awards during his career, the most ever awarded to an individual.

Disney's response to having a beloved character taken from him, not litigation or despair but immediate creation of something new, is the clearest lesson of his career: ownership of a specific idea can be lost, but the underlying creative capacity that produced it cannot be taken the same way. For young people, his repeated recoveries from being fired, bankrupt, and outmaneuvered demonstrate that a string of real failures doesn't disqualify anyone from eventually building something enduring.