Once upon a time, I met Clem Flickinger, 93 years old, who was the same age as his neighbor, Walt Disney, when they were boys growing up in Marcelline, Missouri. Clem told me that when they were six years old, Walt had an idea for the two of them to stage a circus in the basement of Walt’s house. “The only act we had was Walt’s mom’s cat, which Walt could get to sit on a stool,” Clem said. “The only customer was me. Walt charged me a dime, which was the only money I had. When Walt’s mom found out that he had taken my dime, she made him give it back to me.”
This was the stuff on which an empire was built.
The empire wasn’t predicated on the making of money. Young Walt quite literally did not make a dime. There was a transaction. Money changed hands. But the lasting value, what remained after the dime had been added and subtracted, was elsewhere.
The value was in the creation of a memorable experience, resulting in a story that was still wonderful in Clem Flickinger’s telling almost 90 years later.
The value was in working with animals, and making them characters in your narrative.
The value was in getting your friend and neighbor to play along.
The value was in using the material you had available to you. Cat+ Basement+Stool=Circus!
The value was in gaining the entrepreneurial resolve to hang onto the next dime that came your way.
The value was in getting your family involved.
[Walt was the male runt of the Disney litter, nine years younger than the next oldest boy, Roy, and 12 or 14 years younger than the oldest boys, Herb and Ray. On a family farm like theirs, a six-year-old was practically a non-entity. No doubt Walt's circus got him some attention at the supper table that night, even if it was getting his no-nonsense dad, Elias, riled up again, like earlier that summer when Walt had talked his little sister, Ruthie, into helping him paint a city skyline on the side of the Disney farmhouse with roofing tar, which had earned Walt a righteous spanking.]
There was value in breaking a routine that got you no attention.
Around the same time I met Clem, I listened to a set of rare tapes in the Disney Studio archives, recorded in the mid 1950s, of Walt giving an oral history of the studio. A ghost-writer recorded him as research for book to be called My Dad Walt Disney, which would be serialized in LOOK Magazine under the byline of Walt’s 12-year-old daughter, Diane. In those recordings, Walt had a charming way of tracking his studio’s financial fortunes. As he listed the films the studio had made, he’d say [for example], “Well now, let’s see, Dumbo cost us one [million], and it made one and a half. Bambi cost us one and a half and it made two, so we made a half. Make Mine Music cost us one, but it only made a half, so we lost money on that one.”
Sitting atop an empire worth millions, and soon, with the launch of Disneyland in 1955, about to be worth a lot more, there was still a lot of value in a single digit.
Irving Ludwig, the distribution mastermind from New York, who had triggered the 1960s boxoffice revival of Fantasia (which had been a flop when first released in 1940), and had later moved to Burbank to run Disney’s distribution arm, Buena Vista, once told me that his boss, Roy Disney, paid generous rebates worth millions of dollars to the exhibitors who profited from the Fantasia revival, because, as Roy explained it, “they stuck with us when the studio wasn’t doing as well as it is today.” The value of loyalty, and the relationship with their business partners was worth more to the Disneys than a financial windfall that was, contractually, theirs to collect.
It’s not that the money doesn’t matter. It does. But it’s just a footnote to the creation of lasting value. When you understand what builds and sustains the business, it can be okay, or even good for the business, to ‘give back the dime.’
I call this difference between the value of the transaction and the value of the experience the Flickinger Factor. It is the Flickinger Factor, and not the money, that is ultimate measure of your achievement. Your narrative. Your brand. Your legacy in the world.
So what are you doing today that might be making people smile 90 years from now?
Yes, we are here, and I see a place we can grab over there. Yes! A new crack reveals itself, and we grab it. We see another hold and we make the move. Yes, and now we’re experiencing the mountain from a new perspective. Multiple new holds appear, and one hold at a time, with each move accompanied by a thousand little calculations that are faster than conscious thought, we move up the face of the mountain. 
