I think it’s been long enough… yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve made my point.
I picture you and your teammates anxiously perched around your late-version MacBook… still rocking the clothes you had on last Wednesday… cardboard and Styrofoam delivery boxes strewn about the office floor and credenza… frazzled hair just WAITING to see what I posted on Day 4 of my 5-day Disney series!

(it’s probably true…..)
Alas, you will have to personally spend the exactly 2.3 seconds it takes to look up Walt’s last 2 lessons on staying motivated and bouncing back from failure.
I have never had a problem staying motivated in my life…. ever.
I LOVE WORK!!! I love the people I serve and I love the genuine, caring, supportive, hard-working superstars that I work with! I bound out of bed every day - every single one and even on the weekends - and hop to it with excitement as to what the day may hold and what dreams I get to fulfill or watch others fulfill in the next 12 hours.
Sorry, Walt, I have never had a problem picking myself up in the morning or rebounding from failure.
What I HAVE had a problem with is this:
FINISHING. LITERALLY. ANYTHING.
...without starting 6 other tasks in the process. The allure of that cold, smooth little electronic buzzing, dinging, alerting, pint-sized drill sergeant in charge of my day proves just too much to ignore.
At the bottom of smartphone addiction, psychoanalysts say, is award-seeking behavior. The smartphone is a low impact way to claim those rewards from the real world. But it means many of us are just on them too much, to our peril.
Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains writes about our brain and its ability to think deeply and concentrate fully. He doesn’t own a smartphone, which perhaps itself sounds a bit extreme, but I’m guessing he has a much more fulfilling life than I do. He states:
“One thing my research made clear is that human beings have a deep, primitive desire to know everything that’s going on around them. That instinct probably helped us survive when we were cavemen and cavewomen.”
That instinct now, however, with the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, does not serve us. It enslaves us. It immobilizes us. It makes us less effective at out jobs and in our ability to serve those around us.
Our kids feel it, our clients feel it, unsurpassed clinical depression diagnosis rates show it. This little device and all the information it contains that we “think” we need to know each moment of the day are robbing us from FOCUS and THOROUGHNESS. They’re taking away our EDGE and masking our TALENT.
I have a plush velvet black box with black satin-covered cushioning inside (the casing for one of my most cherished sales achievement awards) that sits on the entryway bench inside my front door. It is labeled "The Box of Human Interaction." If you come visit me or my amazing teenage daughters, you will be asked to place your drill sergeant inside and we will proceed to have an ACTUAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE together! And not ONE MINUTE of it will be spent reading self-help articles or talking about what Walt Disney said all those years ago.
Did you really have any measurable change in the way you approached business last week when you read Walt’s words of wisdom on my wall? How about the 17,000 other short articles that popped up in your feed demanding your attention? Did they alter your success in your client relations? Did they change anything about the way you came home to your kids?
Let’s open up that desk drawer!
Stick the seargent where the sun don’t shine! (the desk drawer, that is...what were you thinking?)
Bring back FOCUS and EXCELLENCE to our craft and personal “phone-call-or-drop-by-not-text-or-email” service to our clients!
Let’s re-engage with our clients, our spouses, our growing-all-too-fast ankle biters, and our community!
P.S. This message is Walt Disney-approved.
