8 successful people grateful they got canned
It never feels good to get fired. But for these celebrities, getting the boot from their gigs provided the impetus for them to reach even greater successes
1. Jerry Seinfeld
Remember the ABC sitcom Benson? Seinfeld undoubtedly does. Early in his career he had a small recurring role as a mail boy on three episodes of the show from 1980-81. One day he showed up at work for a read-through, but he couldn't find a script with his name on it. After Seinfeld asked what was going on, an assistant director told him he'd been fired from the show, but nobody had remembered to tell the young comedian. A humiliated Seinfeld trudged out and decided he was through with sitcoms unless he could get more control over the creative process. As you might have heard, he was pretty successful once that eventually happened.
2. Michael Bloomberg
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By most any metric, the mayor of New York is a pretty successful fellow. His $25 billion net worth makes him one of the ten richest people in America. He wasn't always so successful, though. In 1981, investment firm Salomon Brothers canned him from his partner-level job following a buyout (although Bloomberg got $10 million as a payment for his capital in the firm). Instead of jumping back into another job at an investment bank, Bloomberg took the cash and bet it on an oddball idea he had to use computers to disseminate financial information to investment firms. Good move. The company, Innovative Market Systems, was eventually renamed Bloomberg L.P., and it's worth somewhere north of $20 billion today.
3. Robert Redford
Before he became the Sundance Kid, Redford needed his dad's help to get a job at Standard Oil. Although he would later reach great heights on the screen, acting like a good employee was one role he never nailed. As Harvey Mackay writes in his 2004 book Fired Up!, Redford served as a "roustabout," an unskilled laborer who did little jobs around the rigs, until he was discovered sleeping in an oil tank he'd been assigned to clean. Instead of canning him on the spot, the company put Redford on probation and moved him to a bottle-washing plant where he drove a forklift. Redford got bored with the job, though, and started doing forklift tricks. One day it literally all came crashing down when Redford took a corner too quickly and overturned his bottle-laden forklift. As Redford dryly remarked to Mackay, "I knew it was the end of my career in that business."
4. Wilco
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In 2000 and 2001, the Chicago rock band Wilco recorded an artsy album that departed from the band's previous folk-inflected work. The record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, didn't sound quite like what the band's label, Reprise Records, was hoping for. Although the album isn't aggressively grating, it wasn't full of the radio-friendly rock that the cash-strapped imprint needed to churn out a few hit singles. Reprise refused to release the album and dropped Wilco from its roster. As part of its severance from the label, the band got to take the master tapes of the record with them. Without a label to release the album, Wilco decided to simply stream it on their website for free. As critical buzz for the record built, Nonesuch Records (like Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers) bought Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and gave it a commercial release in 2002. The record was a critical smash; it topped many critics' best-albums list for the year. It was also a commercial success, selling close to 600,000 copies.
5. Annabelle Gurwitch
Annabelle Gurwitch, who hosted Dinner and a Movie on TBS from 1996 to 2002, had at least one show business firing that would have made most people look for a new career. In 2003 she was acting in a play under the direction of her idol Woody Allen when the director suddenly decided he didn't like what he was seeing from Gurwitch. He really, seriously didn't like it. As Allen fired Gurwitch, he launched into a tirade, saying, "What you're doing is terrible, none of it good, all of it bad, don't ever do that again." As if he hadn't said enough, Allen then added, "You look retarded." Taking that sort of abuse from a hero would be too much for some people, but Gurwitch used it as a springboard to a new comedic niche. She started a website that collected other people's stories of being fired, and she later parlayed that into a book, Fired!: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, and Dismissed that shared some of her show-biz friends' stories of terrible firings. The book, in which celebs like Bob Saget, Jeff Garlin, and Tim Allen all told their own tales of sudden unemployment, later became the basis for a 2007 documentary of the same name.
6. Rainn Wilson
The actor who plays Dwight Schrute on The Office isn't quite as eager-to-please as his on-screen alter ego. In a 2007 interview with New York Magazine, Wilson told the story of working as an events coordinator at a foundation for disabled people. When his boss said, "Jump!" he wanted his subordinates to literally ask, "How high?" Wilson wasn't up for that, and he got fired.
7. Howard Stern
It might be hard to believe, but Howard Stern has been fired for being offensive. While working for NBC's flagship AM station WNBC in New York in 1985, Stern did a bit on his show called (and this is not a joke), "Beastiality Dial-a-Date." Negative public reaction to the skit prompted Stern's firing. Instead of cleaning up his material and trying to start fresh, Stern quickly found a new home on FM radio and remained edgy. It worked. Following a jump to Sirius in 2006, Stern now pulls in as much as $70 million a year for his show.
8. Bill Belichick
Belichick, the glowering, hoodie-wearing architect of three Super Bowl wins with the New England Patriots, had a rough start to his head-coaching career. In 1991 he took over the star-crossed Cleveland Browns, and like so many Browns coaches before him, he just couldn't win. Belichick guided the team to records of 6-10, 7-9, and 7-9 in his first three seasons before riding Vinny Testaverde and the immortal Leroy Hoard to an 11-5 record in 1994. The team even won a playoff game that year. The success didn't last for Belichick, though, as the team crashed back down during a 5-11 debacle of a season in 1995. After five years in Cleveland, Belichick had a 36-44 record. Owner Art Modell decided he'd seen enough and kicked his coach to the curb, then moved the franchise to Baltimore. Belichick latched on with Bill Parcells again and became the Big Tuna's assistant head coach in New England and then for the New York Jets. He was better prepared for his next shot at a head coaching gig, which came with the Patriots in 2000. Since then he's won three Super Bowls and been the most successful NFL coach of the last decade. Not bad for a guy even the Cleveland Browns didn't want.
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