Nate
Some ideas seem completely ridiculous at first—until they actually work. Take the Pet Rock, for example. Selling a literal rock as a pet? Sounds like a joke, but it became a 1970s sensation. Crocs? Once mocked for their holey, foam design, now worn by millions who swear by their comfort. And then there’s Google Street View—who would’ve guessed that driving a car with cameras down every road would become a game-changing navigation tool?
An AskReddit thread is full of stories just like these—wild ideas that sounded like guaranteed flops but turned out to be unexpectedly brilliant. Some are quirky, some are genius, and all of them prove that sometimes, thinking outside the box actually pays off.
#1
Once upon a time I had a headache. My then-boyfriend said to take a shower by candlelight.
My first thought was, “Showering in near darkness is a stupid idea” followed immediately by “I want to try it.”
Damn if it didn’t work. I went ahead and married him to retain access to his good ideas and his pancakes.
#3
The way they extracted those kids from the cave in Thailand. The diver and anesthesiologist (first off, how f*****g lucky to find somebody with that overlap in skills) who was consulted and joined the effort said it was a terrible idea. It was only when presented with the other options that he realized this terrible idea was truly their best option.
They rescued all the kids and their coach successfully.
#4
When they were working on the movie idiocracy, they asked the costume designer to find goofy yet futuristic looking shoes to have people wear. They found a small company and decided that their shoes looked so stupid that Nobody in their right mind would ever wear them.
After some time they were asked what would happen if the shoe brand suddently took off, and they answered that theres no way people would seriously buy these.
The brand was crocs
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A plane has crashed in the jungles of New Guinea. Three survivors have found a village and managed to get communication. There’s no way to get an airplane room to land and take off and helicopters can’t make it into the valley. I know! We’ll airdrop medical personnel, supplies for a glider, assemble it, and slingshot it into the air! Then, we’ll catch it with a tow-plane. It worked.
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In the 1700s, this guy named Timothy Dexter had a few of these.
* [Bed warmers] are useful in cold climates, but he took a shipload of them to the Caribbean for sale. They were sold to the molasses industry as ladles and turned a handsome profit.
* He took a load of mittens to the same place. Some Asians bought them to sell onward to Siberia.
* Newcastle was a major coal-mining area. He took a shipload of coal there for sale, arrived during a major miner’s strike, and turned a big profit.
* He did the mittens thing again, this time to the South Seas, and arrived just in time to sell them to some Portuguese traders on their way to China.
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CATS, the Broadway musical. A nonsense fever dream about horny catpeople competing to die and be reborn (yes, that is the plot, insofar as CATS has one), based on a book of silly short poems by T.S. Eliot that are not really related to each other except all being about cats. Just catpeople introducing themselves and rubbing on each other for several hours, then one of them “ascends” aka dies.
To date, CATS has made over a billion dollars worldwide.
#20
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf in WW2, the American Navy was escorting the invasion force to the Philippines when they spotted what appeared to be the main Japanese fleet. The larger ships changed course to pursue, leaving the invasion force guarded by destroyers and escort carriers.
Turns out that was a trick. The real Japanese fleet then turned up to attack. On paper, the Americans were f****d.
Instead of running, the American destroyers charged the Japanese and fought so ferociously that the Japanese, thinking that the American force was larger than appeared, withdrew despite the fact that they were winning.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar
#21
Louis Brennan, inventor of the gyro monorail. His monorail was a single track train which used a gyroscope-based balancing system to remain upright. The designs look insane on paper but it was crazy innovative, safe for passengers, and was apparently even faster than the regular trains (of those days).
#22
So I’m going make a movie about the 2008 financial crash.
-Um, OK…
I’m going explain all the jargon and why it happened
Um, OK, but won’t people be bored?
not if I have Margot Robbie explaining, naked, in a bubble bath
OK you have my attention
It will be great and it will have Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carrell, Selena Gomez and Brad f*****g Pitt
(Some movie executives, probably)
The Big Short is excellent; I have seen it three times now.
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When I was a teenager, I thought *The Lion King* sounded stupid. Disney had just stormed back into massive relevance with several fairy tales in a row that made bank–why were they doing some animal story I’d never heard of? (I hadn’t seen it yet to realize it was kind of lion-Hamlet lol.)
*The Lion King*, of course, made money paw over fist.
