Having a speech impediment when he was young, Albert Einstein was told by his high school grammar teacher that “nothing will ever become of you.”
Oprah Winfrey was fired by management at WJZ-TV in Baltimore from her co-anchor evening news role after being told that she was unfit for television.
Walt Disney couldnot get a job at the Kansas City Star newspaper because he was advised that he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
Soichiro Honda was turned down for an engineering role at Toyota. Unable to get a job, Honda started making bicycles out of a small garage. The rest is history!
Jack Ma was repeatedly told by teachers that he had no talent and would fail. I bet those same teachers would have loved to own just a sliver of Alibaba!
The Beatles were rejected by Decca records and told they had no future in music. Ironically, Dick Rowe, who turned them down, signed the Rolling Stones with the encouragement from none other than George Harrison of the Beatles!
Fred Smith was given a “C” by his professor at Yale for his term paper on FedEx because the “idea must be feasible and workable” in order to get a higher grade. Smith started the company 6 years later using the exact same blueprint.
Why is it not surprising that a 20 year study, done by Philip Tetlock, that tracked 82,000 predictions by 284 experts revealed that expert forecasts were statistically no better than flipping a coin….or as Tetlock called it “a dart-throwing chimpanzee!
Perform better!
