“His work habits showed his ability to concentrate. Even in a large, noisy group he could withdraw to the sofa, take a pen and paper in hand, and lose himself so completely in a problem that the conversation of many voices stimulated rather than disturbed him.”

“He’d played around with and toyed with a variety of other businesses he wanted to start. He realized Instacart was the one for him, when the idea of the business was the last thing he thought about when he went to sleep, and the first thing that he thought about when he woke up in the morning.

And to me, that was as good a definition of obsession as any I’ve heard.

It’s that sort of full on experience that you can never stop thinking about and you never turn off.”

"Though Walt Disney could never fully articulate why he was attracted to animation, falling back instead on vague generalities, it always had these two great and unmistakable blandishments. For a young man who had chafed within the stern, moralistic, anhedonic world of his father, animation provided escape, and for someone who had always been subjugated by that father, it provided absolute control. In animation Walt Disney had a world of his own. In animation Walt Disney could be the power."

"The process of animation was a process of giving life, of literally taking the inanimate and making it animate. It was, at base, a hubristic process in which the animator assumed and exercised godlike control over his materials, which was why it also offered a feeling of empowerment to its viewers who sensed the control."

"In Walt Disney's case the surge of empowerment was so great one might even have concluded that animation took the place of religion for him, since in his adulthood he showed little or no interest in formal religion and never attended church. Indeed, the animator created his own world-an alternative reality of his imagination in which the laws of physics and logic could be suspended."

“It takes a decade of doing to find the thing you’re meant to do.

Most never find that thing, because they skip the first part.

A decade. Of doing.”