The Illusion of Stability: What Disney's Decline Teaches Us About Creativity and Growth

(Illustration: a man sitting in front of a glowing book labeled “NEW IDEA,” with a dark castle and a falling chart in the background. Caption on the image: “Stability is an illusion. Growth is the only way forward.”)

Disney! Snow White!

The fear of losing something comes from the inability to create it. And losing the ability to create — that’s not some rare phenomenon.

We can watch Snow White squirm like worms on a frying pan. Some people are tearing apart the reviews, others claim everything is actually great, but under every such post, there’s a pile of hate.

So what’s the bottom line?

We’ve got the most famous animation company in the world, and it can’t produce any animation. Why? Obviously, they’ve run out of ideas. The only thing they do now is remake old movies and churn out sequels. (Yeah, sure, maybe they’re doing something else too, but that “something else” doesn’t even show up in the media space.)

How is that even possible?

You do realize that ideas in the human mind are an unlimited resource? There are literally no barriers stopping you from sitting down and writing a script. What’s more, if you don’t want to write a new Disney movie script, you’ll come up with a million and a half ideas explaining to me why you won’t do it.

The problem is that someone can’t see the actual reason behind something.

The reason Disney used to make good money: “We have good stories and we can keep remaking them endlessly.”

But the real reason was: “We have good stories and we can create more.”

I looked at a few Disney revenue charts and found one that clearly shows where we missed the crucial moment:

(Chart: Disney Return on Investment 2010–2024, showing TTM Net Income, LT Investments & Debt, and Return on Investment — ROI around 20% through 2018, then collapsing after 2020.)

How much money flows into the corporation, and how much it produces. As of now, you can see that while previously the company’s return on investment was around 20%, things drastically changed after COVID. Massive investments and loans were needed just to keep the company afloat. The result? A 3% return. And even the fact that Inside Out 2 was Disney’s MOST financially successful film couldn’t save the studio’s 2024. (Utter filth, by the way, if you ask me.)

So yeah, it looks like they should’ve hit the brakes back in 2018 — even before COVID went viral.

But we’re not Disney.

Still, we can analyze one thing. Just like you can easily see Disney’s debits and credits on the graph from the previous page, I recommend taking a look at your own earnings and salary as a programmer.

Grab your bank statements — the earlier, the better — and chart out every income source you’ve had. Try to find inflation data and adjust your income accordingly, if you can.

Then look at the income graph. If it’s going up month by month — you’re doing great. But if it’s flat or going down — time to hustle. You gotta make some moves.

We were taught that life needs stability. But the only kind of stability that can save you is stable growth. Stable stagnation is just the illusion of safety — and it’ll crumble soon enough. If two years ago you were earning 50 units of currency per time unit, and now you’re still earning 50 — that’s scary.

There are a million things in this world — illnesses, tornadoes, the tax office, cancer — that can strip you of any sense of stability.

Here’s the upside: unlike Disney, you don’t need to sit around trying to sell your Windows 95 software with new skins. You can just sit down and generate new ideas. Then go out and sell them.

So don’t be Snow White. Evaluate your current situation with a clear head and look for a way out of the CURRENT situation — not from stories about how great things were back in 2007.