“To Napoleon, eating was purely functional. He much preferred to work. The only relaxing activities he indulged in were reading and taking baths. As the solider he had been raised to be, he liked food that could sustain him and only took two meals a day.”

“Smart people are like huskies. If you don’t give them an interesting problem, they become an interesting problem.” -@forgingtowards

It’s very common for an intelligent person to be unhappy- because they don’t know what they should work on. Knowing that you’re meant for more, and not doing more, will drive an ambitious person absolutely insane.

“If you want to maximize minimal potential and become great in any field, you must embrace your savage side and become imbalanced, at least for a period of time. You'll need to funnel every minute of every single day into the pursuit of that degree, that starting spot, that job, that edge. Your mind must never leave the cockpit. Sleep at the library or the office. Hoop long past sundown and fall asleep watching film of your next opponent. There are no days off, and there is no downtime when you are obsessed with being great. That is what it takes to be the baddest motherfucker ever at what you do.”

The constant stress focused Walt, but even without the financial pressures he would’ve been a man obsessed. Bill Cottrell, who often worked at night at the studio on the camera, said that Walt never left at five when most of the staff did.

“His hobby is his work”, another friend, Greg Morris, told a reporter, profiling Walt, “as every moment of his time is given over to it.” Walt had always lived for his studio. Even when he wasn’t at the studio, his mind wasn’t far from it. But his obsessiveness took a far greater toll on Lillian, Walt Disney’s wife. She was lonely. To a Time reporter, she called herself, a “mouse widow“ and joked that she found her husband‘s conversations “fascinating” because “it is entirely given to Mickey Mouse.”

There was little time for anything else. Sometimes, he and Lillian would be out for a ride, and invariably Walt would say that he remembered something he wanted to do at the studio.

“There wasn’t a night we didn’t end up at the studio,” Lillian recalled. So she would curl up on the davenport couch in his office and sleep, while Walt worked, waking up at intervals to ask how late it was, to which, regardless of the time, Walt would answer, “Oh, it’s not late.” Walt admitted years later that he would turn back his office clock, while Lillian slept, so that she never knew how late he had actually worked. Even in bed, Lillian said, he would usually toss and turn, thinking of studio problems, then rise, early, and declare, “I think I’ve got it licked.”