Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / DAY 302 | Entrepreneurs Who Dreamed Big Before Anyone Believed Them
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner helping you get past the six-figure conundrum into multi-six figures, build a business, build a legacy for your family. I offer custom mentoring andor group coaching. If you care, go to elevate with rachelk.com for more information. Today is day 302. my mouse is working. It stopped working. A few episodes ago, and I was like, the batteries died. entrepreneurs who dreamed impossibly big to help inspire you as a travel advisor, dream big. Yesterday we covered the research on why thinking big works. Today we're gonna look at real life circumstances, case studies whose vision at the time sounded impossible to the people around them. Walt Disney. Disney's one of my favorite dudes because he re repeatedly faced financial failure. I think he was turned down 301 times for the financing for Disneyland. Okay. He's he took 300-ish no's before he got a yes. Because that was his big Dululu dream. Not only that, but he had faced so much more rejection earlier in his career. This is why I'm a fan of let people say no to you. Get used to the rejection, because you can't let it affect you. One of his earliest animation studios went bankrupt. He was told by the newspaper editor that he lacked imagination. I think he was doing comics back then. his vision for Disneyland was considered reckless, which is why he was refused any investments or financing to back it for the longest time. I just dropped my pen on the floor. He kept going. Just keep swimming. I love finding Nemo Nemo for that reason. Reason. Just keep swimming. Let me get my pen. Hold on. Here we go. He had to finance Disneyland in an unconventional way, including a TV deal. And look what happened. let's talk about Madame CJ Walker up next is another example. She was born to enslaved parents and she was widowed young. She built a line of hair care products for black women from nothing. At a time when the odds were against a black woman building a nationally successful business, they were like extremely overwhelming. She was the first self made millionaire, one of the first self-made millionaires in the United States. Not just building a product line. But also business and a training infrastructure that employed and empowered thousands of other women along the way. She's like kind of what I'm striving to do with my travel agency. Like my I feel like I might have to go look up her natal chart. I'm not into astrology, I'm Catholic, but that crossed my mind. so fun fact, when I got into travel, I broke away. Previous cleaning business, I really wanted to focus on creating jobs that Paid women well, but didn't require them to have extensive education, extensive experience, and or have to like they could be finished with their work day by three and go pick up their kids. And I would ask for them to be on call potentially every other Saturday or one Saturday a month. That was it. So my goal was to create jobs with my cleaning business. When I started in travel, I originally started it as a side hustle just to earn extra cash and cheap discounted travel because back then agent rates were actually a thing and not like, congrats, you saved 42 cents. and then I got sucked into the no, I'm gonna do this and win all these awards and be a top dog, and everybody needs to know that about me. External invalidation everywhere all the time. that was my absolute I think raison for destruction, raison d'etre. Not my reason for being, but my reason for destruction. Because I was going at it from a very vain perspective. And now that I'm rebuilding it, my whole purpose is to again like my cleaning business, create jobs for women. Well, men too, but like create jobs to be a job creator, actually pay people well, because what is this nightmare That we're living in in 2026. Anyway, next up is Oprah Winfrey. I've mentioned her a lot. you can love her, you can hate her. It's fine. Same with Jeff Bezos, same with all of them. But there are things that they share in common and things that they have done that may be inspiring to you. This does not mean you have to clone yourself to be like them. But we've talked about her self-leadership practices in this podcast and her broader career arc is worth revisiting. so she began in local TV news if you aren't aware. And she was told she wasn't fit for TV. She's too fat. And I don't remember what else. Maybe she was too black to be on national TV. I'm like, ugh, the 80s. Sometimes I feel like where I live is still the eighties because I'm just a brunette and they're like, You're not blonde. Okay. Anyway, she still went on to build not just her talk show, an entire media company and network own. And she was in her fifties when she launched it. But this is a vision that extended far beyond what a single TV show could have achieved. Built on a scale that would have sounded improbable at the start of her career. Okay. None of these stories involved the obvious, these were all narrow paths that they took. If everyone was allowed to just think success into the their reality, everyone would be doing it. Like you do have to take the narrow path. You do have to make sacrifices. You will have it like entrepreneurship holds a mirror up to you and it's like, Here, you need to fix this or figure out a way to delegate this out, right? This is not easy what you are doing. And all of these people had to deal with major, real, overrepeated, over and over and over again rejection, huge financial risks, a vision that sounded to quote unquote the status quo people, reasonable quote unquote people, unrealistic. And that's kind of what fuels my fire when someone's like, Why aren't you just doing what everyone else is doing? Because that's not what I wanna do. But but how are you gonna even make money doing that? don't worry, I'll take care of it. I got this. Like You may not have those people in your environment, but trust me, they are the crabs pulling you back down. And they are rampant everywhere. Okay? So what connects all of these these three all of these Disney, Madame CJ Walker, Oprah Is exactly from the research yesterday. A bold, almost impossible vision paired with sustained, grounded effort and optimism over a long period of time. They didn't get single lucky breaks. They didn't they didn't just fall into success. Okay? It is never overnight. They all pursued visions that sounded crazy to everyone else around them at the time. And they all paired that vision. with sustained grounded effort over years, not a single moment of luck. None of their paths were smooth. They were not obviously destined. It wasn't this wide, expansive freeway with no traffic. It was a very narrow path. Which is like if you want to be extraordinary and get extraordinary results, you're going to have to Do some extraordinary things. Like maybe working, like when people are saying you should take the weekend off and you should hang out with us. You need to have better boundaries in your business. There will be times you will have to work nights and weekends to hit your goals. If this is your true passion and calling, whatever that is in your life. Anyway, we're gonna go into a faith. mode in tomorrow's episode because I'd like to talk about some saints who dreamed impossibly big as well in case you care because they're also most saints many saints in their lives like as they lived their lives they weren't like famously successful or renowned but they've made l impacts that affect us centuries down the road okay Alright, have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.