Who would'a thunk it?

June 2, 2006 9:57 AM

I'm looking for examples of surprisingly successful or unsuccessful individuals.

Specifically I'd like to hear about people who are (or were) successful but whose background and experiences (before entering their field) don't lend themselves to the field in which they have excelled. Basically, people whose success is surprising because they didn't look qualified to do what they do. I am also looking people who are unsucesful but whose background and experiences indicated that they should have been successful. Basically, people whose failure is surprising because they looked perfectly qualified for their field.

An example of the former might be a construction worker from an uneducated background that became a great writer. An example of the latter might be an Ivy-educated son of a wealthy family that went to the best businees school and still managed to drive the family business into the ground.

Historical and political examples (or any field really) are fine.

posted by oddman to society & culture (29 comments total)

Oscar Schindler sort of came out of nowhere and became a great hero during the Holocaust. Pretty much everything he did after that was a failure.

Einstein had developmental problems as a child, worked as a patent clerk and then...

Elizabeth was a prisoner in the Tower of London who one day became a Queen...

Claudius (according to some historical accounts, Robert Graves and the BBC) was a deformed stutterer, thought to be mentally retarded, who became Emperor of Rome.

Adolf Hitler arose from poverty and obscurity to become "The Great Dictator" (after failing as a painter)

Bill Clinton blew it by having a tawdry affair with an intern.
Many other politicians have followed this trajectory.

Mozart died a pauper and was burried in an unmarked grave.

There's a ton of fiction that deals with variations of this theme. Books: "Nicholas Nicholby", "The Great Gatsby", "The House of Mirth", "Barry Lyndon", "Lord of the Rings." Movies: "King of Comedy", "New York, New York", "Thief of Bagdad", "The Gold Rush", "The Last Emperor", "Amadeus"
posted by grumblebee at 10:21 AM on June 2, 2006

Abraham Lincoln is the best one that comes to my mind.
posted by vito90 at 10:33 AM on June 2, 2006

jon_kill, I think pmbuko meant that, yes Bush is and has been an abject failure most of his life, yet here he is President of the United States, not a position many life-long failures achieve.
posted by Destroid at 10:35 AM on June 2, 2006

Unsuccessful? Maybe Jayant Patel.
posted by dilettante at 10:36 AM on June 2, 2006

Shakespeare's background is often cited as evidence that he couldn't have written those plays.
posted by JanetLand at 10:48 AM on June 2, 2006

Nassim Taleb argues that many "successful" people are little more than lucky idiots, even when trained for their profession. His book is full of examples of people who have temporary (financial) success followed by nearly complete ruin. The bulk of the book covers the statistical and logical reasoning behind why this is.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:50 AM on June 2, 2006

Oprah?
posted by sugarfish at 10:52 AM on June 2, 2006

Mozart died a pauper and was burried in an unmarked grave.

Nope.

[H]e earned about 10,000 florins a year - at least £25,000 in today's terms.

"To put it in perspective, successful professionals in late 18th-century Vienna lived comfortably on 450 florins a year."

Or, per Wikipedia:

Because he was buried in an unmarked grave, but not a mass grave, it has been popularly assumed that Mozart was penniless and forgotten when he died. In fact, though he was no longer as fashionable in Vienna as before, he continued to have a well-paid job at court and receive substantial commissions from more distant parts of Europe, Prague in particular. He earned about 10,000 florins per year, equivalent to at least 42,000 US dollars in 2006, which places him within the top 5 percent of late 18th century wage earners, but he could not manage his own wealth... He was not buried in a "mass grave" but in a regular communal grave according to the 1784 laws.

posted by languagehat at 11:00 AM on June 2, 2006

As a child, James Earl Jones had a severe stutter and was functionally mute for 8 years.
posted by ceribus peribus at 11:21 AM on June 2, 2006

Paul Martin, most recently Prime Minister of Canada, was groomed his whole life for the job: son of one of Canada's most influential politicians, successful businessman, and very successful finance minister for a decade. Once he became Prime Minister he was an unmitigated disaster, making no decisions, or making bad decisions, and generally just galumphing around pointlessly. As a result we have a Conservative government with a vampire as Prime Minister.
posted by Rumple at 11:26 AM on June 2, 2006

Juliet Hulme, born 1938, was a convicted murderer at age 16. She later became a respected novelist, writing under the name Anne Perry.
posted by Rumple at 11:34 AM on June 2, 2006

Michael Larson is a good example of both situations. Okay, maybe his success isn't exactly sublime, but it's such a great comedy/tragedy.
posted by kimdog at 12:00 PM on June 2, 2006

Thanks for the clarification about Mozart, languagehat, but what does "but he could not manage his own wealth" mean? Could he reasonably be called a financial failure or not?
posted by grumblebee at 12:06 PM on June 2, 2006

John Wilkes Booth is an interesting case. Member of a distinguished acting family who ended up a reviled, presidential assassin? Lesser actor who transcended living-in-his-brother's-shadow by becoming a changing history?
posted by grumblebee at 12:14 PM on June 2, 2006

Elizabeth was a prisoner in the Tower of London who one day became a Queen...

Uhh, the reason she was a prisoner in the Tower of London was because she could have one day become Queen. It's not like she was locked up for being a common criminal.
posted by desuetude at 12:16 PM on June 2, 2006

J.K. Rowling was an unemployed single mother living on state benefits when she wrote the first Harry Potter book. She's now worth an estimated £576 million.
posted by cerebus19 at 12:27 PM on June 2, 2006

Andrew Carnegie (although gave away most of his immense wealth before he died to fund educational institutions).
posted by zaebiz at 12:31 PM on June 2, 2006

Would Steve Jobs count? He has/had little technical knowledge, merely a little electronics knowledge, yet he was selling microcomputers in the 70s. If you classify his as a techology entrepreneur, I'd say he's extremely unqualified, but if you just see him as a mentor/inspiration/boss/whatever, then he wouldn't count.
posted by wackybrit at 12:43 PM on June 2, 2006

Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates were all autodidacts. Gates dropped out of school, as did Ellison. Jobs is the only one who later returned to finish a college degree.

Gates came from a wealthy and well-connected family (some speculate that Gates' father was both legal council and an important lobbiest for IBM, but I haven't been able to confirm this), while both Ellison and Jobs were orphans.

Ellison was raised by successful and well-connected distant relatives, but didn't follow in their footsteps (they were judges and lawyers). He managed to pick up a lot of department of defense software contracting jobs, and figured out that he could spend more time relaxing if he created a general database system.

Jobs seems to have hung out in techie circles in high school and later. When he found himself in over his head at Atari, he knew to call on Wozniak to write Breakout for him.

Given the low barriers to entry in the PC and software world, such backgrounds are not uncommon, nor are they predictors of success or failure.
posted by b1tr0t at 1:04 PM on June 2, 2006

Could he reasonably be called a financial failure or not?

Well, it depends what you mean by that. He made a lot, he blew a lot, he got into debt. Which describes a large number of people usually considered "successful." But the main point is that the popular image of him as a pathetic pauper who couldn't even support his wife is utterly mistaken.
posted by languagehat at 1:06 PM on June 2, 2006

I am also looking people who are unsucesful but whose background and experiences indicated that they should have been successful. Basically, people whose failure is surprising because they looked perfectly qualified for their field.

Oh, I've got some Surprising Failures for you.
The boys of Long Term Capital Managment:

John Meriwether, Myron Scholes, Robert Carhart Merton, Eric Rosenfeld, Greg Hawkins, Larry Hilibrand, Dick Leahy, Victor Haghani and James McEntee.

"Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund founded in 1994 by John Meriwether (the former vice-chairman and head of Bond trading at Salomon Brothers). On its board of directors were Myron Scholes and Robert Carhart Merton, who shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Initially amazingly successful, it folded in 1998, losing $4.6 billion in less than four months."
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 1:59 PM on June 2, 2006

The Apostle Paul
posted by clh at 2:41 PM on June 2, 2006

O.J. Simpson fits both of your criteria. He overcame physical and socioeconomic challenges early in his life to become a fabulously successful athlete, and then notoriously threw it all away.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 6:21 PM on June 2, 2006

Growing up, I recall lots of people talking about how Steve Garvey was going to be a Senator. And then there were the problems with the women... And then there were the problems with the money...
posted by frogan at 9:23 PM on June 2, 2006

And kids, let's not forget Vincent Van Gogh...

He is popularly known as much for his embodiment of the myth of the tortured romantic artist as for his work, which is seen as the visual expression of his life.
posted by frogan at 9:25 PM on June 2, 2006

If we're allowed athletes, how about Brent Gretzky? Played 13 games in the NHL, 1 goal, 4 assists. A lot is made of Wayne's father making the backyard rink and putting out pylons and having skating drills, but Brent (and Keith, also drafted) had the same circumstances.
posted by Rumple at 9:54 PM on June 2, 2006

I think you need look no further than the case of Michael Faraday.
Reading his story is like reading the prototypical fairytale about the genius who's born poor, educates himself and somehow manages to rise from the doom of an imposed menial lower class career to become a globally respected titan of science, and who's discoveries paved the way for basically all of the most important developments of civillization to occur within the past 150 years. He even rejected the offer of knighthood later in life!

I recommend the book "Genius Explained" for more case studies of similar geniuses who are rather unknown.
posted by archae at 11:21 PM on June 2, 2006

George W. Bush obviously comes from a very privileged background but sorely lacks all the qualities one would expect a president (or leader of any kind) to possess.
posted by Devils Slide at 7:52 AM on June 3, 2006

We decided to go with Rumple's suggestion because it is a great example and there is also a readily available counter example in Winston Churchill (apparently he was not well thought of before becoming the PM during the war). But I wanted to acknowledge that Grumblebee, Archae, cerebus19, ceribus peribus, and JanetLand made some really good suggestion also.

Thanks everyone.
posted by oddman at 10:40 AM on June 5, 2006