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Hello Aluxers! Welcome back for another original video presented to you by our team here at Alux.com.
Getting fired can be one of the worst feelings in the world.
Whether you saw it coming or not, getting fired is not something you ever want on your resume.
But your reaction to the firing makes all the difference.
You can either let it get you down or see it as an opportunity for a new beginning.
They say the best revenge is a life well-lived,
and today we’re going to look at some perfect examples of this with our list of famous people who were fired.
Let’s get started.
J.K. Rowling always dreamed of being a writer, but that didn’t pay the bills until she was 32.
So she held a few other jobs in her life, including working as a bilingual secretary at the London office of Amnesty International.
But she spent a lot of her work time secretly writing the first Harry Potter book on her work computer.
Her employer finally noticed her distracted work habits and fired her.
Of course, she went on to become the first billionaire writer and the author of one of the most popular book series ever, so don’t feel too bad for her.
We all know Jerry Seinfeld, but do you know what he did before creating nine seasons of the sitcom Seinfeld.
Yes, he was a stand-up comedian, but he also had a recurring role on a show called Benson in 1980 when he was 26.
He played a mail-delivery boy named Frankie.
Seinfeld actually had some disagreements with the director about his character, which led to him being unceremoniously fired.
They didn’t even tell him to his face.
He just showed up at work only to find out he had been written out of the script.
However, with his current net worth of 950 million dollars, we can say that he has landed on his feet.
Anna Wintour is best known as an iconic fashion figure and the editor-in-chief of Vogue, a position she has had since 1988.
In 1975, when she was 26, she left the UK and moved to New York City,
where she was hired as a junior fashion editor for the publication Harper’s Bazaar.
Just nine months later, she was fired because her editor didn’t appreciate her innovative shoots.
Speaking of the experience, Wintour once said,
If you follow the National Football League at all, Bill Belichick needs no introduction.
He is the six-time Super Bowl-winning coach of the New England Patriots.
This is in addition to the two Super Bowl rings he won early in his career as a defensive coordinator for the New York Giants.
What you may not know is that he was hired as the coach of the Cleveland Browns in 1991 only to be fired after the 1995 season.
Five years later, he accepted the head coaching position with the Patriots.
He now holds the record for playoff and regular season coaching wins,
while the Browns have played in exactly one playoff game since he was fired, a game they ended up losing.
Can you imagine iconic singing legend Madonna working at a Dunkin’ Donuts?
Well, it turns out it wasn’t a great fit.
She worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Times Square in New York City for not even a full shift
before she was fired for squirting jelly filling on a customer.
She was only 19 at the time, and less than 4 years later her debut album would be released.
Canadian treasure Ryan Gosling was cast in the leading role in the 2009 film The Lovely Bones,
but if you happened to catch that film, you already know that he was replaced by Mark Wahlberg.
Apparently, Ryan took it upon himself to gain 60 pounds after he was cast by literally drinking melted ice cream all day.
He felt it would make him look more age-appropriate for the role.
The film’s director, Peter Jackson, didn’t know about Ryan’s transformation until he showed up on set,
and, to say the least, he wasn’t thrilled.
Gosling was very quickly fired from the film.
Billionaire Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and 2929 Entertainment and is also well-known for co-starring on the show Shark Tank.
Cuban has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but that got him into trouble at one of his first jobs after college.
He was working as a salesman but also developing his own business on the side.
One day he opted to meet with a potential client rather than opening his employer’s store.
This resulted in him getting fired, but he never worked for anyone else ever again—only himself.
He soon started the incredibly successful tech company MicroSolutions, and today his net worth is over 4.1 billion dollars.
When Walt Disney was 18 years old, he was working as a cartoonist for the Kansas City Star newspaper.
However, this opportunity was short-lived.
His editor ended up firing him, saying that he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
This led to him taking over an animation company called Laugh-O-Gram, which ended up going bankrupt.
He turned everything around when he moved out to Hollywood and started what would become the Walt Disney Company.
Robert Redford has been in more than 70 films in his long Hollywood career,
so he’s probably forgotten all about his failed career as an employee of Standard Oil.
He was removed from his first role at the company after he was caught sleeping when he was supposed to be cleaning.
He was given another opportunity in another role in the company, but he was ultimately fired after breaking a few cases of glass bottles.
You might know Kerry Washington from her hugely successful show Scandal
as well as roles in several films, including Django Unchained, Cars 3, and American Son.
But her acting career didn’t start out so smoothly.
She starred in two pilots before landing her role on Scandal.
The good news? Both were picked up for full seasons.
The bad news? She was fired and replaced on both shows before they went on air.
But she’s doing fine now, making one million dollars per episode on her new show Little Fires Everywhere, coming out in 2020.
Spoiler alert! Before he was a famous actor and comedian, Bill Hader worked as a movie theatre attendant.
But he was fired after one particular incident that in hindsight is pretty funny.
He said a group of girls were being rude to him, so as he took their tickets to the film Titanic, he said to them,
“By the way, the boat sinks at the end and Leo dies.”
His boss was less than amused.
Famous Australian actor Hugh Jackman has made an impressive living based off his voice and acting talents,
but before his voice made him millions, it cost him his job.
As a teenager, Jackman was working at a 7-Eleven convenience store,
but he ended up getting fired because his supervisor thought that he talked too much.
Robert Downey Jr. started acting when he was only five years old,
but he began to struggle with substance abuse at a young age, which would majorly affect his career.
After a stint at rehab, it seemed his career was getting back on track when he landed a role on the popular show Ally McBeal.
He even won a Golden Globe for his work, but after being arrested twice on drug charges, the producers had enough.
They fired him and wrote his part out of the show.
You can get the much more detailed version of the story by watching our video
How Robert Downey Jr went from addict to becoming Iron Man.
Just click in the top right corner to check it out.
Oprah Winfrey’s net worth exceeds two billion dollars, and she is recognized as one of the most influential women in the world.
So the producer who fired her from her job as co-host on the evening news in Chicago in 1977 is probably still kicking himself.
Oprah was only 22 when she was fired from her co-anchor position for being too emotional when telling the news.
That emotional side would certainly come in helpful in her 25 seasons hosting the Oprah Winfrey Show.
We’ve reached number one on our list, and we’ve saved him for number one because not only was he fired,
but he was fired from the company he created.
Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, about 10 years after co-founding the company.
He said,
He said starting over took away the heaviness of being successful and allowed him to be creative.
He returned to Apple in 1997 and took it from the verge of bankruptcy to becoming one of the giants in the tech industry.
And that wraps up our list, Aluxers.
We hope that if you’ve ever been fired that you’ll take some inspiration from the big-name successes on the list.
Just know that failure doesn’t define you, but how you react to it does.
Now that we’ve reached the end of our list we’d like to know:
Let us know in the comments.
And for sticking with us until the point, what does that mean?!
Here's your bonus:
In the United States, the average number of people that are fired per day is close to 54,500,
which equals out to nearly 20 million firings per year.
The top four reasons people get fired are dishonesty, violating company policy, insubordination, and poor performance.
Thank you for spending some time with us Aluxer.
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