This Article was written by the previous Urban Legends Editor Mystic Houston
Like most urban legends, this is an oft repeated story. Only it didn't happen to a friend of someone's aunt's cousin's grandma. It happened to Fred Smith, the founder and president of FedEx. And apparently, he inadvertently started it.
The story is that when Fred Smith was attending college, he once wrote a paper outlining his business plan for his not-yet-created company. His professor, obviously not seeing the brilliance of his ideas, gave him a C on the paper. This "fact" is popularly known and turns up in any number of places, usually to illustrate the point that not everyone recognizes another person's potential and this is why none of us should ever give up on our own potential. We all have inside us the ability to be great - to aspire to great things - and no one else needs to believe in us. We only need to believe in ourselves.
Great advice - absolutely!! But based on an actual factual event? Not exactly.
Yes, Fred Smith of FedEx attended college. Yale University, actually. And yes, he wrote a paper. But was it a paper outlining his future business plan? Nope. It was actually a paper talking about what he saw as a growing need in a world that was beginning to rely more and more on computer technology - the need for there to be a fast and efficient way to deliver products to customers in need. He felt that the only way that businesses could effectively rely on computers would be if they would be able to get replacement parts as quickly as possible (overnight preferably) when those computers broke down. And yes, he didn't get a very good grade on the paper, but whether or not he actually got a C...who knows? What is known is that he made an offhand comment that he probably got his usual C one day when someone asked him what grade he got on the paper. But he really doesn't remember. He only knows that the paper was not very well written and that is the most likely reason why his grade wasn't very high.
In other words, this was not a case of a Yale professor being unable to see the budding genius of one of his students, but rather it was the case of a mediocre paper receiving a mediocre grade. Of course, a story like that isn't quite so fun to tell. But don't take my word for it. In an October 2002 article for Fortune, Fred Smith told us the story himself. (That link is to a PDF file, by the way. If you can't read it, you need to go to Adobe.com and download the Adobe Reader.)
So, as Paul Harvey might say...now you know the rest of the story.
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