21 People Who Torpedoed Their Whole Careers With One Statement

If you’re anything like us, you have a mantra playing in your head at all times: “Don’t be weird. Don’t be weird. Don’t be weird.” That’s because we know that saying one weird thing, one time, can be enough to forever alter someone’s — even the entire world’s — perception of you. We’ve seen it happen enough times. It’s especially risky if you happen to believe something incredibly stupid or heinous, but it can happen to anyone.

In fact, some people’s entire careers can get derailed based on one stupid comment. Sometimes, it’s deserved. Like, maybe a football coach has no business saying that people with disabilities are being punished by sins they committed in a past life. Why did he say that?  

But some people can ruin their own lives by saying something completely innocuous that gets taken wrong or even something 100 percent correct that the world just wasn’t ready to hear. It’s so common that when user pretendstoknow asked r/AskReddit, “What really successful person was ruined by one stupid thing they said?,” there was no shortage of examples.