Harrison Ford

What failed

Signed to a studio talent programme at a hundred and fifty dollars a week, he played uncredited bits until the head of the programme called him in, called him boy, and told him he had no future in the business. The studio cut his seven-year contract short after eighteen months. The next contract ended too. A director cast him as the lead of a film and the studio forced him out of the part for a more experienced actor. By about 1970 carpentry, not acting, was paying the bills — he taught himself the trade from library books to support his family — but he never left the business: he went on taking television bits and film parts through American Graffiti in 1973 and The Conversation in 1974, and he was still on the tools four years after American Graffiti came out.

What happened next

Hired as a carpenter on a studio lot, he was pulled in to read lines opposite other actors auditioning for a science fiction film. He was thirty-four when Star Wars came out. Years later, in a studio dining room, a waiter brought him a card from the executive who had written him off. It read: I missed my bet.

The point

The anecdote everyone repeats turns out to be true and first-hand — he names the man. What gets left off is that the executive was not obviously wrong at the time. Ford had done nothing yet. Being told you will not make it is not evidence about you; it is a forecast, and forecasters miss.