Since our first edition together, we’ve revealed the secret sauce of over 200 of the world’s most successful creatives.

Today’s edition contains a pretty special insight because I can’t think of a single one of those 200+ creatives that didn’t rely on it!

And if you’re curious to explore how this insight can be applied in your own life, we’ve got another AI-powered journaling exercise for you to try at the end.

Let us know if these should become a regular feature if you decide to take it for a spin.

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and 40 principles relied on by the world’s greatest creatives. 

Something Never Been Done Before

On an ice-cold Tuesday in March of 1928, Lillian Disney boarded a train from New York to Los Angeles in a “state of shock” and “scared to death.” She and her twenty-six year old husband, Walt, were leaving NYC with “no source of income and no idea of what the future held for them.”

Walt’s up-and-coming animation studio had just been backstabbed out of a major contract with Universal Pictures. The betrayal meant that Walt was set to lose almost all of his staff, almost all of his income, and absolutely all the IP he had been working hard to develop in recent years.

But the worst part? 

Walt was still on the hook for several weeks of work on the same project that he had just lost control over!

Were it not for the train carriage window separating them, Walt’s seething anger might have melted the snow that blanketed the countryside whizzing by outside. But as he scribbled furiously in his notebook, a plan began to form in his mind.

He wasted no time once he arrived back in Los Angeles—quietly recruiting a few trusted employees to work on a brand new, top-secret, animation project.

If they could produce some new IP fast enough (and find someone willing to buy it) then they had at least a slim shot at keeping the studio open after they parted ways with Universal.

The problem was that Universal executives would be furious if they learned about this conflict of interest, or maybe even try to steal it, so Walt and his renegades had to work mostly under the cover of darkness, and mostly out of his home garage to keep the operation under wraps.

The double work schedule was intense but after a few grueling weeks of effort, Walt and his team completed the first animation of a new series featuring a cartoon mouse named Mickey.

There was just one problem.

No one could be convinced to distribute it. 

Walt pitched it to everyone he could lay his hands on but no one felt it was particularly special and many even felt Mickey had a problematic personality.

This goofy mouse was not enough to save Walt’s company or his future.

On May 29th, two months after receiving bad news in New York, Walt called an emergency meeting at his house with his depleted and ragtag team.

They sat amidst the physical evidence of their failed rebellion—the unwanted drawings of a cartoon mouse that they had gambled everything on and lost.

We’re going to “make them over—with sound,” Lillian remembers her husband blurting. “It’ll be realistic. That’s what we’ve got to do. Stop all these silent pictures!”

Was it a stroke of genius or desperation? No one in the room could know for sure but the team was certainly reenergized by the idea.

“It was the prospect of sound now that motivated the staff—the prospect of doing something no one had done.”

Technically, the first film with sound (“The Jazz Singer”) had been released a few months prior, but the Disney studio’s plan was to push the envelope further than it had ever been pushed.

Their animation would be the first to feature fully synchronized sound effects, not just simply layer music and dialogue over the top.

Like most new things though, adding sound proved to be much harder than expected, and doubt was quick to creep in. “Drawings are not vocal,” one person protested, “why should a voice come out of a cartoon character?”

It didn’t help that no one on Disney’s team had any clue what they were doing. After all, there was no blueprint to follow. They were wrestling with a technical challenge that had never been solved. 

It may come as no surprise, then, that Walt’s first recording session was an expensive disaster. The studio ran out of money shortly after the fiasco, prompting Walt to write a letter to his brother, urging him to “slap as big a mortgage on everything we got.”

So, with both of their homes now remortgaged, Walt scraped together enough money for another recording session.

When everyone arrived for round #2, they were surprised to learn that Walt had “devised a new system to crack the problem of synchronization, which had been vexing not only the Disneys but all the animation producers. He had a ball printed on both the sound track and the film that rose and fell to the accent of the beat.”

To everyone’s amazement, the second session was a breeze.

Walt himself said that this innovation “worked like clock works” and “saved this picture.” As a result, Steamboat Willie was the first animation in history to feature all-encompassing and fully synchronized sound.

So then they all finally lived happily ever after, right?

Build it and they will come?

Of course not!

The concept of sound was so foreign that every single distributor refused to sign on. Walt was left with no choice but to go direct to market and debuted Steamboat Willie at a Broadway theatre for a two week run.

The showing was truly his last stand.

If this didn’t work then the Disney studio would almost certainly declare bankruptcy, possibly never to be heard from again, and leaving its founders facing homelessness.

But this time the audience’s reaction was undeniable. “The reception was astonishing,” writes one of Walt’s biographers. “It knocked me out of my seat,” remarked one critic. Another called it “an ingenious piece of work with a good deal of fun. It growls, whines, squeaks, and makes various other sounds that add to its mirthful quality.”

Distributors were now suddenly climbing over each other to woo Disney.

Rival studios immediately pivoted to sound but it took more than a year for any of them to catch up to Walt and his innovative synchronization system. One animator, whose studio never did catch up, admitted that “Disney put us out of business with his sound.”

When Walt was at his lowest point—when he saw his final Hail Mary failing—he somehow intuited exactly what he needed to do next:

Something that had never been done before.

Nothing has a more positive and transformational effect on your destiny than introducing something to the world that it both wants and has never before seen.

And it doesn’t have to be big.

It could be as simple as introducing your team to a new way of working, or becoming an expert in a valuable subject area at the frontier of your industry, but if you can somehow figure out how to push the envelope into uncharted (and useful) territory then the payoff can be astounding.

Now you know what to do, let’s look at one more case study to gain some clues on how to do it.

What can the world of baseball teach us about successfully breaking the status quo…?

_{Source: Walt Disney—The Triumph of the American Imagination}

By Conventional Standards, Radical

If you’ve watched the movie Moneyball or read the book by the same name then you will be familiar with the term “Sabermertrics.”

Put simply, Sabermetrics is the application of statistical analysis to baseball in order to predict the future performance of players.

The “Oakland A’s” popularized Sabermetrics after they used it to recruit a team of underdogs who went on to win their 2002 season despite having a much smaller budget than rivals.

But where did the Oakland A’s get the unconventional idea to marry statistics and baseball in the first place?

The answer is stranger than fiction.

The idea can be traced back to a security booth outside a Kansas canning factory on a Spring night in 1976.

Inside that booth was a security guard named Bill James who, as he flicked through a stack of preseason Baseball Yearbooks, recalled realizing: “These are terrible. Why am I wasting my time reading the analysis of people who know half as much about baseball as I do?”

Despite having zero qualifications or experience in either baseball or statistics (he was a former marine turned security guard), James committed to writing his own baseball analysis. 

Presumably, he figured passion would make up for what he lacked in credentials.

Fast forward one year and James published his first edition of Baseball Abstract, “featuring 18 categories of statistical information that you just can’t find anywhere else,” with sixty-eight pages of detailed statistics.

The readership was tiny but highly engaged.

One of those engaged readers was a lawyer named Sandy Alderson, the legal counsel for the Oakland A’s. But Alderson wasn't just a suit; he shared James's deep passion for the sport, a passion that would soon see him transition from the legal department to the General Manager's office.

And once Alderson was in the driver’s seat, inspired by James’s work, he proposed a crazy idea: the team should base their recruiting decisions on spreadsheets and regression analyses.

“The ideas were,” as one team of baseball analysts write, “by conventional baseball standards, radical. The largest problem Sandy had, with using analysis and with a number of other things he wanted to do, was that he was an "outsider" by baseball standards, and had an entire baseball organization full of old-school baseball people, who were not amenable to new ideas, and most especially new ideas from an outsider.”

Despite the initial pushback, this new stats-based approach to baseball had shown plenty of promise by the time Alderson’s successor took over in 1997, one Billy Beane, who was ready to go all-in on Sabermetrics.

That’s where the Moneyball story famously begins.

But it’s this strange story-before-the-story, featuring a passionate security guard and lawyer-turned-manager, that contains the richest insight into the origin of revolutionary ideas.

Here are some takeaways that we’ve seen repeated across countless case studies…

1. Desperation and frustration can help spur the kind of bold thinking that leads to revolutionary ideas.
   
   Disney was pushed to think boldly when pushed to the brink of financial ruin; James had the idea to start writing his own baseball publications after growing frustrated with the industry standard.
   

2. You do not need formal expertise in an industry in order to usher in disruptive ideas; passion and curiosity are more than sufficient.
   
   Disney’s studio had no experience with sound; neither James nor Alderson were baseball players or statisticians.
   

3. Many of those who possess the most extensive expertise in an industry are often unable to recognize the value of revolutionary ideas and even actively push back against them (so be wary of their advice).
   
   Every single animation distributor rejected Steamboat Willie; most people in the Oakland A’s pushed back against Sabermetrics.
   

4. Revolutionary ideas frequently arise through the combining of two previously disparate fields.
   
   Animation with sound; baseball with statistics.

To increase your odds of stumbling upon an industry-breaking idea: pay attention to your frustrations, follow your fascinations, and envisage how two fields can become one.

Oh, and don’t forget to take what the “experts” say with a dumpster truck of salt!

Time to reflect…

How can you personally implement today’s principles?

➡️ Try this edition’s AI-powered journaling exercise.

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