Walt Disney World during Fourth of July week is where sunscreen goes to die.

My family has annual passes to the parks. Those passes give us the privilege of walking miles through Florida heat with two boys under five and discovering every part of the human body that can chafe.

I've gone so hard in the parks, my chafing starts its own chafing.

Somehow, I love it.

The ROI of those sweat and tears shows up on my boys' faces when Mickey walks past our table after waiting all day to see him. It’s like I can physically see their imaginations wake up.

Something odd happened this last trip.

By the time everybody fell asleep each night, every sensible cell in my body was bibbidi-bobbidi-done, but my imagination was annoyingly electric and awake.

I opened my laptop and started battling with an idea: What would the Lewis and Clark expedition feel like from the perspective of Seaman, the Newfoundland dog who traveled with them?

Why that very specific story? I have no clue.

I started playing. A scene became a story, the story became a chapter, and more chapters followed. Then chapters became a short story.

I never plan to share that story. It’s not the point.

THE POINT is that little creative shock I got in the parks. Somewhere between the July heat, chafing, Dole Whip, Mickey, and bedtime, those parks made me want to create.

How did Disney do this, and how can you do it to others?

I've spent years returning to Lee Cockerell's Creating Magic, Ed Catmull's Creativity, Inc., and Pat Williams's How to Be Like Walt. Each book, and others like it, cracks open a different door into Disney's creative world.

The parks let you walk through that door and feel the details before you know they're there.

You rarely stop to admire any one of those choices, but you sense what they’re all doing together.

Kyle Laughlin, who leads research and development for Walt Disney Imagineering, recently gave away the whole game:

"Our product is emotion."

Disney can build that emotion through a movie, a robot, a hotel, or a place you physically enter.

That explains what happened to me.

Disney had created a hot spot of creative energy. Every little choice conducted that energy through the park and into the people walking around it. One of those people was an exhausted dad who stayed awake writing about a dog crossing the American West.

(I have had less productive evenings with considerably more sleep.)

Ask someone what they took away from a podcast episode, a book, or a Sunday sermon, and they might struggle to answer. That’s not a knock on them. Most of us consume a lot more than we retain.

But something still happens between the information going in and disappearing again. We feel something.

Maybe we feel understood. Maybe we feel brave enough to try. Maybe we feel like the world is bigger than we thought it was ten minutes ago.

Shaan Puri says people come to content for a feeling. Not information. In fact, with the rise of AI, information is a commodity, and its value has dropped aggresively in the last few years.

Shaan Puri once described your newsletter, business, book, or channel as a little shop in the world’s most crowded flea market. You’re not really selling stuff. You’re selling the feeling people carry out when they leave.

Dana White is much blunter: "I sell holy shit moments for a living."

Your work already conducts a feeling too.

Your newsletter might conduct courage. Your company could conduct relief. A church service might leave people feeling seen. A story might make the world seem larger than it did ten minutes ago.

The question is whether you chose that feeling, or left it to accident.

Genesis opens with creativity producing more creativity. God makes a world, fills it with life, and hands image-bearers something they can cultivate.

Good creative work still does that. It puts energy into another person and gives that energy somewhere to go.

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️