35 Ideas That Were Ridiculed On Paper But Ended Up Being Successful In Real Life

The Sims computer game. It sounds like the stupidest idea ever - who would want to control a Sim character doing all the mundane s**t we do every day. How boring. But I played the s**t out of the Sims, then the subsequent versions.

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.

The guy who bought sections of the berlin wall. People were tearing it down and he wanted to buy some of it. The government was like, lol sure you pay us for something we are tearing down anyways. He has been selling pieces of the wall as souvenirs and is fairly wealthy from it.

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.

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).

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

Putting out oil well fires by blowing them up.

I feel iPads and tablets in general. Who knew there was a market in-between cells and laptops. Its like a new spoon that’s bigger than a small spoon, and smaller than the big spoon.

Some guys thought people would be interested in renting out their bedrooms to strangers.

Airbnb was this born.

Trimming trees with 10 circular saws attached to a metal bar, dangling from a helicopter.

Twitter

Let's restrict users to very short messages for no particular reason. Looks dumb on paper but really took off (and then eventually devolved into an alt-right dumpster fire, but that's another story)

Arguably, ride share. What?! Strangers drive you and they don't even have a medallion!

Hula Hoop

Trains

Can they go uphill? No

Can they go downhill? No

Can they go round corners? Not really

Can they go across the ground? No they need special tracks to run on

Can they travel through snow? No

Can they travel if the rails get really hot? No

Can the driver decide which way to drive? No

Okay, how about...

You take a popular children's toy and make a movie out of it?

Sounds ridiculously dumb and yet you have The Lego Movie, Barbie, the entire Trolls media franchise... oh, and holy s**t, the American Girl dolls have *so. many. movies*. I'm not saying everything is an amazing watch, but if you're talking about successes then you can't deny there have been a lot of them.

Plenty of failures too though, for sure.