The title pretty much explains it: who are some people who gave up an activity they were extremely good to devote themselves to something they were simply not good at? It still counts if they returned to their strengths later. I’m mostly thinking of famous people, here, but I’d also be curious about anecdotes from your own lives.
My shots:
Alexander Grothendieck: Considered by many the most important mathematician of the century, he resigned from his university to found a relatively uninfluential environmental advocacy group.
Michael Jordan: Retired from basketball to play baseball. Wasn’t good at the game, returned to the NBA.
I’d disagree that MJ wasn’t “good” at baseball. I mean, shit, he was good enough to become a professional at it, I’d say that qualifies pretty easily as “good”. He obviously wasn’t the great, great athlete in baseball he was in basketball but he was no slouch at baseball either.
IIRC there was apparently one type style of pitch he could not hit to save his life, and this is (of course) all he got once this failing was discovered.
[Mickey Rourke’s](be a good to mediocre boxer was) decision to go from being a top rated up and coming actor to being a good, but not spectacular ham and egg boxer mid career was kind of surprising.
Well current 49ers rookie Jarryd Hayne would qualify. He was arguably one of the best Rugby League players in the world and at the age of 27 went off to play a sport that he had never played even as a child.
Reuben Fine was a top-class chessplayer with an excellent record against no less than five actual World Champions, but gave it up while at his peak in order to concentrate on psychology. I don’t know enough about psychology to know if Fine was ever regarded as unquestionably one of the world’s top ten in his profession, but I’d say the odds are poor.
Eric Clapton famously made his reputation with John Mayall and then with Cream playing Gibson guitars, most famously a sunburst Les Paul with Mayall, leading to the Clapton is God graffiti, and with his psychedelic Gibson SG, Firebird and an ES335 with Cream. His famous “Woman Tone” from the Cream era (e.g., Sunshine of Your Love) is Gibson-based. He switched to a Fender Stratocaster around 1970 - some would argue because he saw Hendrix and was humbled by his mastery of the Strat. His signature Clapton Strat has a mid-range boost circuit in it, so it can “kinda” sound Gibson-y, but not really.
Clapton has primarily played a Strat since, with occasional uses of Gibsons. If you get on guitar messageboards, to this day, you have folks who HATE, HATE, HATE how Clapton sounds on a Strat and can’t understand why he stopped playing Gibsons and focusing on his mellower songs.
It would be easier to list all the singers who tried acting who didn’t do poorly as actors: David Bowie, Cher, Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, and maybe a couple of others.
Just personally, I know plenty of great librarians who are mediocre-to-awful managers and administrators, and at least one who is absolutely truly gifted at storytelling and a laughingstock in the current job. It’s sad.
I tried being a library manager fairly early in my career and quickly realized it wasn’t a good idea. I can still keep a room full of kids enthralled, though.
In the same vein, my favorite teacher in high school became a horrible administrator. He’ one of several good teachers/professors I’ve known that were promoted into administration and were awful at it.
I’d not heard “Peter Principle” before, but it seems to be applied in educational settings all the time. When will people learn that a good teacher and a good administrator are two different things? It’s doubly sad, because not only do you get someone unqualified to be a principal or dean, you also lose so many good teachers.
