Fabulously Failed Forecasts

found online by Raymond

 

Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock – TV executives in 1966 urged that the “pointy eared character” be dropped

From The Propaganda Professor:

Predicting the future accurately is always a daunting challenge, even when it entails merely assessing the potential of a single person. Walt Disney was fired from his first newspaper job by an editor who declared that he had no imagination or original ideas. Michael Jordan failed to make the cut on his high school basketball team. Steven Spielberg was rejected three times when he applied to University Of Southern California film school. Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene famously scoffed at a newcomer on the theatre scene, a certain young “upstart crow” named William Shakespeare. Network executives urged Gene Roddenberry to “get rid of the pointed ears guy”. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first TV job because she was “unfit for TV”. A newspaper editorial during the 1992 presidential campaign predicted that George Bush would win reelection quite easily, with Ross Perot coming in a distant second, and dismissively added that “Bill Clinton is not considered a factor.”

The difficulties are magnified astronomically when you are dealing with groups of people, and entire cultures. There are so many butterfly-effect variables, so many of which are unforeseeable. In 1962, when a new major league baseball team made its debut, they were truly horrible, winning only 40 out of 160 games. Everyone wrote them off as hopeless, forever doomed to be a laughing stock. Nobody saw it coming when, 7 years later, this ragtag team called the New York Mets made an abrupt pivot in mid-season, surged into the playoffs, and decisively defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series.

Not surprisingly, then, many people who have predicted the future, including individuals who were extremely knowledgeable about the topic, have been drastically, embarrassingly off track.

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