What Were They Thinking?

Late Tuesday evening, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol took a page from the "How Not to Lead" playbook, scribbling his name on a decree declaring martial law. Now, declaring martial law in a democracy is one thing; doing so with no pressing crisis and seemingly not checking in advance to see if anyone would support you is something else altogether. This, mind you, in a country that has spent decades laboring to move past the ghosts of authoritarianism. Hours later, Parliament snatched the pen from his hand, tore up the decree, and began sharpening the knives of impeachment. It was the kind of political misstep that would make even Nero’s fiddling seem like sensible governance. One imagines Yoon waking up the next morning, rubbing his temples, and wondering if it was all a dream - or at least hoping it was.

But Yoon's ill-fated gamble isn’t history’s only candidate for the hall of fame of What Were They Thinking?! The annals of human folly are generously stocked with leaders and business tycoons who, in moments of either blind arrogance or catastrophic naiveté, made choices so baffling that one suspects divine comedy must have been at play. From empires sunk by a single miscalculation to companies that poured fortunes into doomed ventures, the stories are as plentiful as they are absurd. Perhaps they should be required reading for anyone handed the reins of power, though one suspects that hubris, like fine wine, is something people prefer to experience for themselves.

This is the terrain we’ll be navigating today - where the stakes are high, the errors are monumental, and the consequences are both tragic and absurd. Yoon’s Tuesday night misadventure might well join the pantheon of epic blunders, but it’s got stiff competition. After all, who could forget the time a tech giant turned down a fledgling search engine called Google, the 12 different publishing firms that rejected J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, or the Roman emperor who decided to invade Scotland, where the only prize was rain-soaked misery? Buckle up, because the wisdom of hindsight is a marvelously brutal thing.

Decca Records says “No” to the Beatles

On New Year’s Day in 1962, Brian Epstein shepherded his scrappy Liverpool quartet - still calling themselves the Silver Beatles - into Decca Studios in West Hampstead, London.

The boys, then an unpolished act with Pete Best behind the drums, performed 15 songs for the solemn judgment of Dick Rowe, Decca’s senior talent scout and, in retrospect, a man whose talent for scouting was about to abandon him. With casual conviction Rowe waved them off, explaining to Epstein, with the certainty of a man in the wrong profession, that “guitar groups are on the way out.”

Somewhere, perhaps in Liverpool, the gods of music sighed and plotted their revenge. And revenge they exacted. Now signed to Capitol Records, in 1964 The Beatles had sold over 15 million records (9 singles and 6 LP’s) in the US alone. By the summer of 1967, The Beatles had earned an estimated $50 million, equivalent to roughly $480 million today. By the time they launched their own label, Apple Records, in 1968, they weren’t just a band but a global cultural force.

As for Rowe,

his name now lives on as a cautionary tale, a case study in missed opportunities, the kind that makes every aspiring mogul double-check their instincts, lest they too fail to recognize the alchemy of genius when it’s still in the raw. Guitar groups weren’t just in - they were immortal.

The Sinking of the Vasa

In 1628, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden

decided his navy needed a showpiece - a grand, awe-inspiring warship that would silence whispers of his rivals and inspire awe among his allies. Thus, was born the Vasa, a floating cathedral to hubris outfitted with 64 cannons, two gun decks, and the kind of gilded ornamentation that could make even Versailles blush. The king, however, demanded a few…adjustments. He wanted more firepower, more grandeur, more of everything. Stability, alas, was not on his list of demands. When the shipwrights murmured about balance and physics, they were overruled; Gustavus was building a statement, not a boat.

The statement was made loud and clear when, on its maiden voyage, the Vasa tipped gracelessly in a light breeze and sank less than a mile from shore, with much of Stockholm looking on.

The ship’s cost - an estimated 200,000 riksdaler - would be roughly $300 million today. For perspective, this was a nation that had to scrape together taxes from its peasants and plunder from its enemies. The Vasa now rests in a Stockholm museum, a reminder that while empires rise and fall, the price of ego remains eternal.

No One Phoned Home

In 1981, someone at Mars, Inc. had the cosmic misfortune of missing a golden opportunity - or perhaps they just didn’t believe in extraterrestrials. When Amblin Productions came knocking, offering to feature M&M’s in a new film, Mars gave a polite but firm “no, thank you.” No one at the candy giant could have foreseen that the film in question, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, would become a global phenomenon, grossing nearly $800 million - roughly $2.5 billion today - and cementing itself as a cultural touchstone. Left scrambling for an alternative, Amblin turned to Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces. The result? A 65% jump in Reese’s Pieces sales within months of the film's release, not to mention the kind of brand halo most marketers can only dream of.

The repercussions for Mars were, in a word, humbling. Hershey parlayed the success into a surge of consumer goodwill, building a candy empire that still leans heavily on the enduring legacy of E.T.'s glowing finger and Reese's candy-coated charm. Mars, of course, survived the blunder - M&M’s remain an iconic staple of snacking - but one imagines there’s a lesson in humility somewhere in their archives, quietly filed under Whoops.

The Donner Party’s “Shortcut”

In April 1846, a motley band of about 90 pioneers set out from Illinois, lured westward by the promise of California’s fertile lands. Led by the Donner brothers - Jacob and George - they followed the well-trodden California Trail, a wagon route that might have safely carried them to their destination.

But impatience, ambition, or plain bad judgment persuaded them to veer off onto an untested "shortcut" through the Sierra Nevada mountains. What followed was a calamity of frostbite, starvation, and despair that turned their dream of new beginnings into a macabre cautionary tale. The shortcut they’d hoped would shave weeks off their journey instead added months, as well as a grim chapter to American history.

What keeps the Donner Party infamous, though, isn't just their tragic miscalculation but the whispered horrors of their final days. Snowbound and starving, some members resorted to cannibalism, a detail that transforms their story from merely tragic to grotesque.

While their misadventure predates the California Gold Rush by two years, one could argue they struck a different kind of gold: a place in the annals of infamy, proving that some shortcuts are anything but.

Fox versus The Empire

In 1977, the executives at 20th Century Fox found themselves staring at George Lucas, a bespectacled, unassuming filmmaker, and thought they’d struck the deal of the century. Lucas, eager to get his little space opera off the ground, agreed to forgo $20,000 of his directing fee in exchange for something Fox considered a throwaway clause: the merchandising rights to Star Wars and any sequels.

At the time, film merchandising was barely an industry; plastic figurines and lunchboxes were the stuff of cheap promotions, not billion-dollar empires. Fox walked away from the table thinking they’d gotten a bargain. They had, in fact, gifted away the galaxy.

Over four decades later, Star Wars is not just a film franchise but a cultural juggernaut. The original trilogy alone has grossed over $10 billion in today’s dollars, and the merchandise - a staggering array of action figures, lightsabers, and every conceivable branded trinket - has raked in over $40 billion. George Lucas, who might have been just another talented director, became a titan worth $5.2 billion, a significant portion of which came from those overlooked merchandising rights.

Meanwhile, Fox has spent decades quietly choking on the irony: they saved $20,000 only to miss out on billions. It’s a mistake that transformed Lucas into an empire builder and left Fox holding the crumbs of their own shortsightedness.

Jungle Overreach

Scotland’s Darien scheme of 1698 is one of history’s more tragicomic lessons in hubris - a grandiose gamble by a small nation to establish its own colonial empire in Central America. Flush with dreams of turning a swath of mosquito-infested jungle in Panama (known as the Darien Gap) into the next global trading hub (which they were calling New Caledonia),

the Scottish ruling class poured nearly half of the nation’s capital into the ill-fated venture. Farmers, aristocrats, and clergy alike invested heavily, seduced by the promise of untold riches. What they got instead was malaria, starvation, and the stubborn refusal of local geography to bend to human ambition.

Within a few years, the scheme had failed spectacularly, leaving Scotland not with an empire but with a debt so crushing it practically begged England for a financial bailout. By 1707, the Scottish ruling elite - bankrupted and politically neutered - reluctantly agreed to the Act of Union with England, creating Great Britain.

In the end, the Darien scheme wasn’t just a failed colony; it was a two-for-one deal of ruin: economic disaster at home and geopolitical submission abroad. All told, the debacle cost Scotland what would now amount to billions in today’s dollars - a staggering price for a handful of jungle fever dreams and some very bitter lessons about overreach.

They Should Have Googled It

In 1998, Yahoo! stood as the colossus of the internet age, the search engine of search engines, perched smugly atop the dot-com mountain.

So, when two scrappy upstarts - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - came knocking, offering their fledgling company Google for a cool $1 million, Yahoo! didn’t just pass. They swatted the offer away like a pesky fly. After all, why would a titan stoop to buy an ant? But what seemed like sound corporate decision soon unraveled into a case study in catastrophic miscalculation.

By 2002, Google had ballooned into something more than an ant - it was a juggernaut rewriting the rules of the web. Realizing their blunder, Yahoo! came back to the table, now willing to shell out $3 billion. The catch? Google, ever the clever negotiator, wanted $5 billion. Yahoo! balked. While $5 billion might have sounded like a lot, Google is now worth over $1.7 trillion, making Yahoo!’s hesitation one of the most expensive second thoughts in business history. Today, Yahoo! is a footnote in the tech world, while Google sits atop its throne,

leaving the world to marvel at how a million-dollar rejection turned into a trillion-dollar regret.

Napoleon Invades Russia

In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte - self-styled Emperor of the World, or at least Europe - assembled an army of more than 600,000 men and confidently marched into Russia.

His goal? Not just to tweak the nose of Czar Alexander I but, in true megalomaniac fashion, to pave a path to India, the jewel of British trade. Napoleon was so sure of a swift victory he declared the campaign wouldn’t last more than 20 days. Unfortunately for him, Russia had other plans - ones that included lice-infested uniforms, typhus outbreaks, scorched-earth tactics, and a winter so brutal it made hell look cozy. By the time Napoleon’s Grande Armée staggered into Moscow, they were met with an empty city and a lot of smoke – because the Russians had burned it to the ground.

By early September, Napoleon’s army was a shadow of its former self, with fewer than 100,000 men left fighting. The retreat from Moscow, immortalized in countless paintings and even more schadenfreude, became the ultimate humiliation.

The Emperor of Europe was escorted out of Russia not as a conqueror but as a frostbitten fool. The cost? Hundreds of thousands of lives and the beginning of the end for Napoleon’s empire. It was a masterclass in overreach, proving that while ambition can be grand, it’s no match for snow, starvation, and stubborn Russian resolve.

Atari Doesn’t Like Apples

Once upon a time, before Apple was the world’s largest company and a cultural monolith, it was just two guys tinkering in a garage. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, armed with their fledgling invention - the Apple personal computer - decided to pitch it to then-computing giant Atari.

Jobs and Wozniak offered Atari a chance to buy the computer outright or, at the very least, hire them to help develop it. Atari’s response? A resounding no, delivered with all the foresight of a man waving away a free lottery ticket because he doesn’t like the numbers.

What happened next reads like a modern-day tech parable. Atari dismissed the Apple vision entirely, opting to stick to their niche in video games. Meanwhile, Jobs and Wozniak, undeterred, set out to change the world.

Apple grew into a global behemoth worth trillions, reshaping how humans interact with technology. Atari, on the other hand, became a relic of its time, still best known for “Pong”.

In hindsight, Atari’s decision not to be tempted by the Apple, and remain safely in the garden as it were, was a masterclass in corporate myopia. If they’d said yes, who knows? Maybe today we’d be typing on AtariBooks and wearing Pong Watches, while Apple would be that quirky little startup that never quite made it out of the garage.

Hitler Invades Russia

Adolf Hitler’s apparently hadn’t read his history books (see Napoleon above) because his decision to invade Russia in June 1941 was the kind of hubristic misstep that turns great despots into cautionary tales. Armed with more than 3 million soldiers, 3,000 tanks, and a belief in his own infallibility, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa,

shattering a non-aggression pact with Joseph Stalin that had barely gathered dust since its signing in 1939. The plan was simple: blitz through Soviet territory, crush Stalin's forces, and establish Germany’s dominance over the Eastern Front before the first snowflake fell. But much like Napoleon before him, Hitler underestimated two critical factors: the vastness of Russia and its uncanny ability to weaponize winter.

At first, the invasion seemed like a grim masterpiece of efficiency - by October 1941, the Germans had taken 3 million Soviet prisoners and pushed their way to Moscow’s doorstep. But the campaign dragged into December, and the Wehrmacht found itself woefully unprepared for a Russian winter that turned roads into icy traps and soldiers into frostbitten shadows of themselves. When Soviet troops launched a fierce counterattack, the Germans faltered.

What Hitler envisioned as a quick conquest unraveled into a catastrophic defeat, leaving his armies battered and exposed. The invasion marked the beginning of Nazi Germany’s decline and became cemented in history as a classic study in the overreach of a man who gambled the fate of his empire on the mistaken belief that you could conquer Russia with hubris and no mittens.

A Blockbuster of a Screw Up

In the year 2000, Blockbuster was the undisputed emperor of the video rental world, a sprawling empire of fluorescent-lit temples where Friday nights were made, and late fees loomed like unpaid penance.

So, when a scrappy little startup called Netflix - then in its infancy and peddling DVDs by mail - offered to sell itself for a modest $50 million, Blockbuster didn’t just decline; it scoffed. Netflix’s Reed Hastings wasn’t pitching a partnership; he was offering a lifeboat to a company that, much like the captain of the Titanic, didn’t yet realize the iceberg was dead ahead. Blockbuster executives laughed him out of the room, secure in their belief that no one would trade a trip to their beloved blue-and-yellow storefronts for a few clicks on a website. Spoiler alert: they were wrong.

By 2010, Blockbuster was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, while Netflix was busy reinventing how the world consumed entertainment.

Today, Netflix boasts over 230 million subscribers worldwide and a valuation north of $150 billion, a far cry from the $50 million Blockbuster found laughable. As for Blockbuster, it has been reduced to a nostalgic punchline, its legacy a bittersweet mix of faded VHS glory and yet another cautionary tale about corporate hubris. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Blockbuster is still immortalized in internet memes - proof that even colossal blunders can have their day in the sun, albeit as the butt of a joke.

In the end, these grandiose blunders expose a universal truth: humans have an unmatched talent for confusing ego with genius. From the Soviet winters that humbled Napoleon and Hitler to the corporate titans fumbling their empires into irrelevance, history is littered with proof that arrogance is the only renewable resource we seem to have in abundance. We’ve all, at one time or another, believed we were the exception to the rule, only to face-plant into the cold, hard pavement of reality. These decisions weren’t just miscalculations; they were egos colliding with the brutal physics of consequences.

But maybe there’s a lesson buried in the wreckage, though not the kind we like to frame on office walls. It's not that we should stop taking risks or dreaming big - far from it. It's just that, somewhere in the fine print of ambition, we should acknowledge the possibility that the universe doesn’t revolve around us only. What looks like a slam dunk on the whiteboard often morphs into a slow-motion train wreck when real life shows up, armed with irony and a stopwatch. It's that old cosmic joke where the punchline is always on us.

So, let’s raise a glass to the Yoons, the Rowes, the Atari executives, and all the other bold visionaries whose reckless decisions made history just a little more interesting. Because as much as we might like to believe we have all the answers, there’s something comforting in knowing that no matter how high we climb, gravity is always waiting to remind us of our humanity. In the world of monumentally bonehead mistakes, perhaps it’s not the error that defines us, but how spectacularly we crash.

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