Achievements In Ignorance / Real Life

Music Performance

• When teaching young children how to play their instruments, a good teacher never tells their students that anything is "easy" or "hard". As a result, those children learn to play well much more quickly.
• Pianist Martha Argerich supposedly learned Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit in a week, not knowing it was supposed to be hard.
• John Bonham learned to play a bass drum triplet with one foot after listening to a Vanilla Fudge record and mistakenly thinking that Carmine Appice was doing the same—Carmine was an early user of a double bass drum kit. While heel-toe (which is essentially what he was using) is standard now among drummers who need to play extended double-kick rolls extremely fast, it was completely unheard of back then.
• Virgil Donati developed fantastic bass drum technique by practicing until he could play Deep Purple's "Fireball" with one bass drum, not realizing Ian Paice used a double bass to pull it off when he recorded it.
• The cornerstone of impressionist André Philippe Gagnon's act is his spot-on imitation of a saxophone (using only his voice!) perfected as a child when he imitated Henry Mancini's The Pink Panther theme. Why? He didn't understand that it wasn't a person making that noise!
• New Age guitarist Michael Hedges taught himself to play The Beatles' "Yesterday" in its recorded key of F, a very difficult key to play in using standard guitar tuning. He only much later learned that Paul McCartney had tuned his guitar down a whole step and played the song as if it were in the much easier key of G.
• Classically trained harpists don't use their little fingers to play. However, Harpo Marx was self-taught and, as such, used his little fingers when playing because no one told him not to. He was dismayed to hear his playing style was "wrong" and hired a tutor to teach him proper technique. He eventually fired the tutor when it became evident that the tutor was more interested in learning Harpo's style than in teaching Harpo the classical style.
• Chet Atkins was a guitarist with a unique and extremely difficult four-finger picking style. It took him years to develop that style. He did it because he was convinced that it was impossible to play like Merle Travis with only the thumb and forefinger. He was wrong; that was exactly how Merle Travis played.
• Some left-handed guitarists like Dick Dale and Albert King play their guitars upside-down, with the strings upside down as well. This makes for some special chord structures and a special way of bending the strings (downwards, instead of upwards).
• According to jazz legend, Art Tatum taught himself piano by copying an automatic player piano, not realising it was playing music for four hands. It appears to be just that, a legend, but a good story nonetheless.
• A lot of The Beatles' groundbreaking achievements come from them not being too familiar with the way music's "meant" to work from a traditional way. On "A Day in the Life", Paul McCartney said he wanted all the instruments in the orchestra to start off on their lowest note, and then finish off on their highest, as loud as possible, after 24 bars. It was left to George Martin to transcribe that to music notation^note Martin eventually solved it not by having the instruments all finish on their highest note, which would have sounded even more cacophonous than the final effect, but having them all finish on the highest note that they could play which formed part of an E major chord, which creates the satisfying impression that they started in chaos and ended up in unison. Another case involves "Strawberry Fields Forever": when the band had recorded two completely different versions of the song, John Lennon said he wanted to use the first half of one and the second half of the other. When the producer and engineer pointed out that they were in different keys and tempi, he just shrugged it off and said: "You'll work it out." As a result, they had to spend painstakingly long hours varispeeding and editing, but they successfully joined them together^note The splice happens exactly 60 seconds into the song. Had John (or Paul on the "Day in the Life" example) been classically trained or had a more "academic" approach to music, they might never have come up with such original ideas.
  • Ringo Starr never really had any formal training either. He's left-handed, but plays a drum kit set up for a right-handed person, since he'd never been told differently by anybody when he was young. As a result, while he's not a particularly flashy drummer, his music contains various flourishes and fills that baffle people who have their drum kit set up "correctly".
• Carter Beauford, drummer for the Dave Matthews Band, taught himself to play as a young boy by watching himself in a mirror imitating what he saw his favorite drummers do. However, being so young, he didn't realize until later that by watching himself in the mirror he was doing the reverse of what his role models were doing. The end result, when he figured this out and learned to play "properly", is that he's one of the very few ambidextrous drummers in the world and has a unique style that's caused him to be considered one of the greatest rock drummers ever.
• Jazz trombonist "Slide" Hampton did much the same; he learned to play the trombone by mimicking his instructor...which required flipping his trombone upside down and playing it left-handed!
• Jim Stafford was completely self-taught on every instrument he plays, which astounds anyone who has seen him perform—for example, playing "Classical Gas" on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, it's shocking the acoustic guitar doesn't burst into flames.
• The Shaggs were subjective in the quality of their music and were objectively mediocre musicians. Somehow, they were praised by Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, and several other famous musicians, and inspired not only a tribute album but a stage musical. They obviously had very little knowledge about musical theory or the instruments they were playing, singing, and as such were forced by their father to form the band because he saw success in their future. At one point, Zappa called them "Better than The Beatles". Now with this in mind, go listen to one of their songs.
  • See also Outsider Music for more examples of "bad" musicians who have success for similar reasons.
• Mike Flores developed his now-famous bass technique by accident; as a child, he was trying to learn guitar but kept losing guitar privileges whenever his parents grounded him, so he picked up his father's bass (which couldn't be taken away) instead and tried to emulate using a pick with his fingers instead of plucking. This was well before one could readily access instruction videos to find out how the pros did it, so he essentially just played in a way that made sense to him. This technique was, by conventional standards, totally wrong, but he didn't know this and became so proficient with it that there was no point in trying to learn how to play correctly, as he could play circles around just about everyone with it.
• Marty Friedman is known for having a very unusual picking style that makes replicating his solos extremely difficult; as a largely self-taught player, he never learned how he was "supposed" to attack certain passages, and as a result, he developed a style that was his and his alone. Not only does he not palm mute (which is practically unheard of in rock and metal), but he regularly uses upstrokes where most guitarists would use downstrokes and vice versa, and he frequently picks from the fingers rather than the elbow or wrist, which is yet another curveball that makes his solos sound even more unique. The result is compositions that are far, far more difficult to play than they sound, which throws lots of players unfamiliar with his style off when they try to learn his solos and find that they just aren't coming out right with traditional pick attacks.
• Slash knows virtually nothing on music theory yet is responsible for some of the most iconic guitar riffs of The '80s, often through just playing around and with basic experimentation, and is commonly listed as one of the greatest guitarists in rock music history.
• Buckethead managed to learn how to play (at least most of) Shawn Lane's "Kaiser Nancarrow" because he didn't know Lane composed that song in a way that it was unplayable in real time.
• Joe Walsh of Eagles taught himself to play the harmonized guitar part in The Beatles' song "And Your Bird Can Sing", not realizing that it was actually George Harrison double-tracking himself and that even Harrison himself couldn't play it on one guitar at a time.
• Pete Sandoval (of Morbid Angel, probably the most influential Death Metal drummer ever) has a funny story about how he became known as "Pete the Feet". One day the other members played a recording of a drum machine, and lightly poked fun at Pete for it being faster than him. His response? He kept practicing and practicing until he was able to outpace the machine, eventually forcing the band to admit that it was, in fact, not a real drummer.
• When Ninja Sex Party covered "Africa" by Toto, lead singer Danny Sexbang was completely unaware that the verses and choruses were originally sung by two different people with very different vocal ranges. Sexbang sang both parts by himself, not knowing this fact.
• Neil Peart, drummer for Rush, plays three very fast triplets on timbales at the start of the song "Time Stand Still." He got the idea from a Genesis song, and later worked with the engineer who helped the band record it. The engineer told Peart that the fill in the Genesis song had actually been recorded with the tape slowed down.
• The development of X Japan and by extension much of the Visual Kei scene happened as a direct result of this trope: Yoshiki, hide, Taiji, Toshi, and Pata didn't know and didn't care that Glam Rock and Glam Metal were generally thought to be incompatible with Speed Metal and Thrash Metal, how to promote within the Japanese record label and media system of The '80s without upsetting the apple cart of the industry, and much more about how to do metal music "right", and almost all of them aside from Toshi were drunk much of the time. Somehow, this only helped them start the country's most successful and biggest-selling rock/metal band and become the Trope Namer, Trope Maker, and defining band of Visual Kei.
• Downplayed with H. Jon Benjamin, who became an awesome piano player on his first try even though he didn't know how to play the piano in the first place - but he plays jazz piano, where the whole idea is making it up as you go along with whatever sounds good to you.
• Donna Summer, her producer Giorgio Moroder and his assistant Pete Bellotte all agree that when they put together "I Feel Love", they were just aiming for an interesting, futuristic-sounding Disco song based around synthesizers. Instead, they unintentionally created the entire genre of Electronic Dance Music from scratch, with Eurobeat and Italo Disco in particular using the song as a starting point.

Science and Technology

• The origins of gunpowder are Shrouded in Myth, but it is popularly attributed to being accidentally created by Taoist alchemists in an attempt to formulate an immortality elixir.
  • Similarly, the use of mercury fulminate as a firearm priming substance was accidental. The people doing the experiments had been trying to replace black gunpowder, and wanted a propellant that didn't require external flame in order to ignite. It was only after a few experimental runs of using the rather volatile fulminate to ignite conventional gunpowder that gun makers realized that firing a gun didn't require the priming source and the main charge in a gunshot to be made of the same substance.
• In 1976, it was widely known in the computer industry that the circuitry needed to make an entire general-purpose computer work could not fit in a box smaller than a desk. Steve Wozniak designed the Apple 1 Personal Computer in 1976. He later stated that had he known more about computer theory back then, he wouldn't have tried to make the Apple 1 - however, what probably made it possible at all was his habit of taking Mini Computers (the desk-sized versions) which used 150 chips and taking entire weekends redesigning them, often with only 50 chips. This habit alone probably would have invoked this trope from the computer engineers of the time.
• Played straight by Thomas Edison. He had very little theoretical knowledge in sciences or engineering. Instead, he simply implemented what was known to be working, and tried the "brute force" method of trial and error until he got something working.
• In 1939, mathematics graduate student George Dantzig arrived late in class and copied what he thought was homework written on the blackboard. After taking longer than usual to solve the problems, he apologized to his professor for his lateness and turned them in. Six weeks later, he woke up to his professor knocking on his front door asking him to read the introduction he had written for one of Dantzig's "papers": what Dantzig had solved was not homework but rather two famous unsolved statistics problems. To this day, colleges and professors will sometimes place previously unsolved problems like these in with other more mundane problems on "entrance exams" or other evaluative tests, just to see if some brilliant young student who hasn't heard about the problem not being solved yet can find a solution nobody else thought to try.
  • Dantzig's story eventually morphed into the Urban Legend of the student that was late for an exam and barely completed all the problems on the board only for him to be told that the final problem(s) were "unsolvable" problems and that he made history. The legend can be traced to Reverend Robert Schuller, whom Dantzig once met and told him about the blackboard incident only for Schuller to add the embellishments found in the legend.
• For years, physicists knew you could not suspend one magnet over the other without some sort of additional support. The top magnet would either flip due to the attractive forces or slide off. This had been given a beautiful mathematical proof, and anyone caught illicitly trying to disprove it would be the subject of some teasing. However, eventually, someone came along who had the good fortune of not knowing that floating one magnet over the other had long been proven impossible and promptly solved the problem: just spin the free-floating magnet like a top. The original proof had been right as far as it went, but spinning the magnet was a loophole no one had accounted for (save, in a broad sense, superconductors, which work on similar principles but aren't magnets).
• Evolutionary computer design partially uses this principle: you set the end goals you want the program to achieve but don't give it specific instructions on how to get there, allowing the program try some solutions by randomly altering some of the variables, test them, combine the best of them and randomly "mutate" some of the variables again, and go on. The end result is often something no human would ever design but would perform at least as well, if not better.
  • One example was designing a structural "backbone" for a space station. Human designs involved a standard radio-tower style beam, while the computer produced an organic design that looked like an actual bone, massed less, and was structurally stronger.
  • Perhaps one of the strangest examples was when a piece of programmable hardware ran a genetic algorithm to try to create an oscillator and ended up creating a radio receiver and parasite at the same time. Rather than producing an oscillating signal with its own hardware, the circuit "cheated" by detecting and amplifying an oscillating radio signal being produced by a nearby computer.
  • Another experiment run on a programmable logic array to distinguish between sounds resulted in a circuit where part of it wasn't even connected to any inputs, outputs or the rest of the circuit, but if removed resulted in the circuit failing. It also didn't work when copied to another chip of the same kind which means it used subtle manufacturing defects of the chip as integral parts of the circuit!
  • This antenna, which manages better coverage, less energy spent, and skipping some steps of the production process, also looks like a spider with a bad seizure.
• Fold It is a free game about figuring out how proteins fold. Player's results go to researchers over the Internet to see how if the result works. This game helps in a few ways. The first is you can have more people trying to figure out how the proteins fold with almost no training. The other is that many players, due to lack of training, do not have preconceived notions of how proteins should fold. For 15 years, scientists were trying to figure out how a protein in a type of AIDS-causing virus folds. They released the protein as a puzzle in Fold It. Players submitted a solution to how the protein actually folds in 10 days.
• Averted or inverted in the young Richard Feynman's research in liquid helium. He managed to calculate everything he attempted with one exception: the order of a phase transition in liquid helium. Following a presentation, one of the field's tribal elders announced one thing Feynman should be wised up on: nobody has ever been able to determine the order of a phase transition from first principles.
• A superpermutation is a string of symbols that contains every possible permutation of a set of N symbols somewhere within it. For example, for a set of three symbols A, B, and C, ABCABACBA is a superpermutation because all six possible permutations you could make from A, B, and C (ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA) can be found somewhere in that string. Since the mid-1990's it was known that the length of the shortest possible superpermutation could be found using the formula 1! + 2! + … + N!, but once you got to N = 6 it broke down because the formula would overestimate the actual answer — in fact, no pattern can thus far be discerned and a mathematical proof that a set of any size above 5 has an "efficient" superpermutation of exact length X remains elusive. However, in 2011 someone on 4chan posted a proof showing that, for any set with at least 3 symbols, the length was at least N! + (N−1)! + (N−2)! + N − 3, and asked for people to check their work. Though it was on the site's science and math board it was still 4chan, so the problem was explained as "If you wanted to watch the 14 episodes of the first season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in every possible order, what would be the shortest sequence of episodes you would need to watch?" Haruhi was chosen as it was originally broadcast in Anachronic Order in 2006 but the US distributor initially put the episodes in chronological order on DVD, leading to the more mathematically-inclined fans (of which Haruhi already drew an unusually large number) to start watching the series in basically whatever order they wanted. "The Haruhi Problem" and proof took several years for published mathematicians to find but they eventually did, and it ended up making a major leap forward in refining the range of values in which those efficient superpermutations could be. And so, when a 2018 paper titled "A lower bound on the length of the shortest superpattern" was published, the proof was incorporated as a lower bound and the paper has among its credited authors "Anonymous 4chan Poster".^note For those curious, the 2018 paper has the bounds of "The Haruhi Problem" (N = 14) to be 93,884,313,611 and 93,924,230,411; it would take around 4.6 million years to watch.
• Among Conway's Game of Life enthusiasts, the discovery of Copperhead is certainly an example of this. To explain: Copperhead is a spaceship (a moving pattern) that moves orthogonally every 10 generations, making it of period 10. The thing is, higher periods like that one make spaceships exponentially more difficult to find. By 2016, the highest-period spaceships known were of period 7, and were already very difficult to find, with only a handful known for all period 7 speeds. Period 8 was considered beyond range of what most processors can find (and no such spaceship was discovered as of 2022), and anything beyond that was seen as a pipe dream at best. Enters a new member on the forum who probably didn't know how unlikely it was to find a period-10, and runs a custom-made program for it... only to almost immediately stumble upon Copperhead. Turns out, there was a tiny period 10 spaceship just waiting to be discovered, and when other members ran other search programs on period 10, they re-found it too, showing that had they just tried, even on older search engines, it would have turned up for them as well.

Military

• An occasional concept in military thought: for an attack from which there is no possibility of retreat, such as an amphibious landing, green soldiers often perform better than veterans. This is because they are unfamiliar with the dangers of what they are attempting, and will, therefore, try things that veterans know carry a high risk of ending in death. This is encapsulated in an adage from Murphy's Laws of Combat:
  "Professional soldiers are predictable; the world is full of dangerous amateurs."
• Germany's initial military successes during the Second World War were for most part brought by well-executed gambles. Coming out of a depression and lacking in strategic resources, most Wehrmacht officers did not believe that Germany would be ready for war until 1942 at the earliest, and that they simply did not have the capability to sustain any conflict for more than a few weeks. Plus with the experience of the Great War fresh in people's minds, there was an expectation that any future conflict would be characterized by the grind of trench warfare, which favoured the Allies' more favourable strategic positions. Few however, expected that technological advances had made wars of maneuver possible once more, with mechanization, air support, and radio restoring initiative to the attacker. This allowed the ground forces to quickly overrun Poland,^note though the fact that the Soviet Union invaded around the same time arguably had more of a part to play in its downfall, the Low Countries, and eventually France, as most other European militaries had failed to acclimate to this new mode of warfare in time.
  • However, this also led to an overestimation of the Wehrmacht's capabilities, leading to more unreasonable goals as well as complacency, which meant that the German industry would not be fully mobilized for war until 1943. The first warning sign was the Battle of Britain, which ended in the Luftwaffe's defeat: it had failed to appreciate the quality of British air defences as well as the inadequacies of its long-range strategic bombing capabilities, which eventually made the campaign unsustainable. Having failed to learn this lesson, the Wehrmacht then invaded the Soviet Union, assured by past experience and the latter's dismal performance against Finland during the Winter War. While Operation Barbarossa was initially successful, leaving this trope in play, Germany had failed to prepare for the vast distances and adverse weather conditions that they would encounter in Eastern Europe; they had also failed to understand that unlike France or Poland, the Soviets could sustain its losses. As time went on, the Wehrmacht lost the initiative and the conflict turned into a war of attrition, which Germany — with its economic weaknesses and undermobilized industry — was ill-prepared to undertake.
• Imperial Japan's initial military successes present multiple double-edged instances of this trope.
  • Though instigated in part by domestic instability, Japanese military conquests hinged on an utterly unrealistic and overconfident expectation of Japanese military prowess. Their initial successes in China — against a country riven by decades of civil war and lawlessness — led the Imperial Japanese Army to continue its advance along much of the eastern seaboard. In the process however, the Japanese military was spread so thin that, in spite of dedicating one million troops to the mainland — around a quarter of its total military strength — it could neither sustain further conquests nor consolidate its gains. The same would apply to conquests of other parts of Asia as well, with initial successes followed by issues with pacification, spreading its sparse military resources thinly.
  • Prior to 7 December 1941, it was believed that the balance of power in the Pacific — mainly held between the Imperial Japanese Navy, the United States Pacific Fleet, and the Royal Navy's Pacific squadrons — would be sufficient to contain Japanese expansion outside of China and French Indo-China. No one anticipated that Japan would launch surprise attacks on virtually every single European colonial power in the Pacific. In short order, they crippled the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, preventing it from undertaking any actions for several months; likewise, they sunk the Royal Navy's only capital ships in the theatre, which contributed to the fall of their main base of operations at Singapore. All of this was achieved through the use of naval airpower on a hitherto unprecedented scale, providing the bulk of a fleet's striking power. Ironically, the Japanese failed to fully appreciate that naval airpower was a war winner: most of the top brass stubbornly clung to the Kantai Kessen doctrine, which held that the outcome of the war at sea would ultimately come down to a decisive battle between battleships and devoted its resources accordingly. Such an encounter largely failed to materialize: the US Pacific Fleet conserved its assets and was able to utilize its surviving carriers to annihilate the core of Japanese naval airpower at Midway and an essential component in the defeat of Imperial Japan thereafter.
  • And of course, their victories led to them challenging the United States and coming up against the hard fact that it simply didn't matter how hard they won. They couldn't stop the US from attacking, because they had absolutely no way of reaching the US mainland with military assets. There was no way that they could get the U.S. to settle for a negotiated peace where they kept the Phillipines (what most of the Japanese top brass were hoping for), because after Pearl Harbor the Americans were dead set on teaching the upstart warmongers a lesson. They couldn't even afford to replace the losses of their victories for long, while the Americans just came back from every defeat angrier and better-equipped to fight again. And that's not even getting into the atomic bombs...
• Before and during World War II, the US Army Ordnance Department was searching for sufficient aircraft auto-cannon designs but declared that there was no possible way to safely scale up the Browning M2 heavy machine gun into a viable auto-cannon, for such a project would supposedly make the new gun too heavy for aircraft mounting and too impractical to maintain. But across the Pacific Ocean, the various engineers designing aircraft-mounted machine guns for the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force had already copied the basic .50 caliber Browning M1921 aircraft machine gun and gave it a higher firing rate as the Ho-103 in 1941. Further development (without anyone in Japan knowing the original design should have failed if made bigger) yielded the very successful Ho-5 20mm cannon (a scaled up Ho-103), which was installed in many an advanced fighter plane and eventually the 37mm Ho-204 (a scaled up Ho-5), which was fitted to interceptors ironically intended to shoot down American bombers. As George Chinn reluctantly admits, the Japanese had not only done the supposedly impossible task, they had succeeded in making the bigger Browning copies perform remarkably well.
• On May 1, 1984, an Israeli Air Force F-15D Eagle collided mid-air with an A-4 Skyhawk in a dissimilar aircraft training exercise. While the Skyhawk disintegrated after the pilot bailed out, the Eagle had its right wing sheared off two feet from the root. The pilot nonetheless got control of the plane back, landed it - and then saw the damage, which had been obscured during flight by vaporizing fuel. Quote the pilot: "it's highly likely that if I had seen it clearly I would have ejected, because it was obvious you couldn't really fly an airplane like that." Later analysis by builder McDonnell Douglas indicated that the plane's lifting body fuselage and abundance of thrust provided just enough lift to save the plane.

Other

• Martial arts of any kind show a similar strange pattern. A rank amateur with no training is often a greater threat to a master than a beginner since the completely untrained individual will be unpredictable. They may land a lucky shot or series of shots. It's Confusion Fu due to ignorance. This can become very funny in fencing. A martial artist who takes up the sport often has trouble adapting at first and is easy prey to an experienced fencer. A raw beginner will sometimes score hits by accident, especially in épée, where there are no rules about priority or target area. They're just waggling their weapon unpredictably and getting lucky.
  • For illustration: The reason martial arts expert Tony Jaa can pull off his amazing stunts without wires is that he grew up watching martial arts movies without knowing there was such thing as Wire Fu. Nobody thought to tell him he couldn't do what he eventually managed to do.
• When Channel 4 hosted a poker tournament between pro and amateur players, the pros said they struggled with the amateur players, having gotten so used to the tells of their fellow pros. This is likely why so many amateur players can have success in big poker tournaments with seasoned pros: both their tells and betting patterns are foreign to the pros, leaving them far more unpredictable. (A word of warning to anyone hoping to replicate this feat: there are several poker strategies that are very good at taking money from poor players but have serious weaknesses. Expert players wouldn't bother trying them against other experts, but if they have reason to believe that their opponent wouldn't know the appropriate counter-strategy, they can and will use one of these to win easily... unless luck is really against them)
  • Roger Ebert came up against a similar situation. His friend Gene Siskel was a very good poker player, who had cleaned up at his bachelor party. At Ebert's, however, he lost. When Roger asked him what happened, Gene replied, "Your friends don't know how to play poker. You can't win against someone who makes a bet for fun."
• There is also an urban legend about a French immigrant who made a huge business in the USA during the Great Depression. When questioned about the achievement, he stated that his English was so bad back then he could read no newspapers—and, therefore, knew nothing about the depression.
• Akira Toriyama, also doubles as an example of Brilliant, but Lazy. He is constantly praised for his groundbreaking techniques in the manga industry, but he was clueless about said industry when he started. Since he didn't really know what the general tricks of the trade were, he just did what he felt like doing and just published it. The works he produced have since been regarded as some of the most innovative material of its time.
• There is a story of a viral video that went around depicting a man playing baseball with nun-chucks. A martial arts master repeated this apparently unaware that the videos were faked and it was thought impossible.
• This can even come up in chess matches, despite both sides knowing the same information—trying to figure out what the amateur is doing can confound the professional because the amateur doesn't know what they're doing, and so can't be predicted. Also, amateurs will perform the most ridiculous, foolish moves that no competent player would make, and thus a pro might leave themselves open to something resulting from such a move, or find it difficult to realize that it is even being attempted.
  • The four-move checkmate^note 1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nc6 3. Qh5 Nf6?? 4. Qxf7# The "proper" defense against this is 2. ... Nf6 or 3. ... g6. is the single most basic strategy in chess, the very first play most beginners are taught, and consequently, the easiest to defend against. However, multiple masters have been humiliated by amateurs because of it - the master doesn't think to defend against it because no serious opponent would ever use it, whereas the amateur tries it because they don't understand enough to realize it shouldn't work.
• In informal shooting competitions, it isn't uncommon to see people do things with weapons that any knowledgeable person would consider ludicrous, such as learning how to actually use Guns Akimbo because they haven't been told it's impossible. Pretty much, they overcome a lack of formal knowledge and sub-optimal setups just with sheer amounts of practice and stubbornness.
• Many of the innovative visuals and special effects seen in Citizen Kane are the result of first-time film director Orson Welles simply refusing to believe that certain things couldn't be done on screen. He was also fortunate enough to be paired with Gregg Toland, a cinematographer who didn't care if he "failed" to get a shot, so he was willing to try anything Welles requested.
  "Ignorance. Sheer ignorance. There's no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a professional that you're timid or careful. I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do, or the imagination could do. I got away with technical advances simply by not knowing that they were impossible."
• This interview with Ken Levine reveals that if he'd known how difficult and borderline impossible it should have been to create System Shock 2 with the resources and technology he had at the time, he probably would have failed to deliver what is now a classic.
• The illustrator Franklin Booth learned to draw by copying from wood engravings, thinking they were pen and ink drawings. This gave him his distinctly complicated and precise style.
• Rachel Maddow deliberately invoked this: while her show was under construction, Rachel deliberately avoided any advice on how to run the program. At her peak, she averaged around 1.1 million viewers nightly, ranking her second in popularity among all cable news networks, and, after her move to a single show a week, continues to average approximately 2 million viewers.
• In one of the greatest running spectacles in history, an old man named Cliff Young showed up at the start of one of the world's most hellish and mind-numbingly long ultramarathons, totaling 875km between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, in denim overalls and wellies. He never had the slightest chance at finishing the course, as everybody could see, but days spent rounding up sheep on his family farm had convinced him that he could make it through. Five days and fifteen hours later, he crossed the finish line a victor. Apparently, nobody had told him competitors in this race were supposed to stop for sleep breaks, so instead, he just kept going and broke the course record by more than two days. Not realizing that there was a prize for winning, he split the $10,000 reward equally between the next five competitors. His running style, dubbed "The Young Shuffle", was deemed by athletic trainers to be one of the most efficient ways to travel while conserving the most energy. Three other athletes copied his technique to win the race later on.
• Burmese pythons are natural climbers when young. In the wild, however, as they grow to over 12 feet long and 100-150 lbs, the trees they used to climb no longer support them and, after falling a few times and hurting themselves, they learn to stop climbing and hunt along the ground. People who own Burmese pythons as pets keep them from hurting themselves, usually by catching them if they're going to fall. So they never learn they shouldn't climb anymore, and amusing pictures can be found of giant snakes on top of cat trees and bookcases and the like.
• Tommy Wiseau may be the ultimate modern example. To describe the man as, shall we say, not handsome and bereft of filmmaking and acting knowledge or talent would be charitable. Fifteen years after his film debut, it still plays to packed screenings and became the subject of a biopic that not only won a Golden Globe but whose lead actor invited Tommy on stage to thank him for his gift to the world.
• Author Mario Puzo admitted that when he adapted his 1969 novel The Godfather to a screenplay for the first two installments of the film trilogy, he had no idea what he was doing, having had no prior experience or instruction in screenplay writing. After The Godfather and The Godfather Part II netted him one Oscar each for Best Adapted Screenplay, Puzo decided to properly learn the trade and obtained a starter's book on how to write a screenplay; the first chapter read, "study Godfather I."
• When Isaac Asimov was studying chemistry, he detested the subject and did poorly on lab work, continuing only out of inertia. Unexpectedly, one of Asimov's most hated teachers began to fiercely advocate for him in his second year of undergraduate studies, and was a large part of the reason Asimov was allowed to stay in school to get his PhD. The reason is because the year Asimov had the teacher, the man had deliberately given Asimov problems above his level to try and make him drop out. But Asimov hadn't realized that he was being tricked, and had solidly worked through everything he was given, all while hating the material and all without asking for extra help, which impressed the teacher so much that he went from hating Asimov's guts to becoming his fiercest advocate. As Asimov later wrote, "I stubbornly worked through them, however, and did so without complaint because I was too stupid to suspect conspiracy."
• Betty Edwards' Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain is highly regarded as being one of the best books on drawing in spite of it initially being based on the "Left Brain/Right Brain" theory, which has long since been proven false. The reason? The techniques the books used to help others learn how to draw actually work. Newer editions of the book now speak of the Left Brain/Right Brain theory in a figurative sense instead of a literal one.
• Downplayed with Arc System Works, who as a whole, had little to no experience with Unreal Engine 3 and managed to make it run Guilty Gear Xrd at a solid 60 FPS, with stylized looks and animation reminiscent of high-quality sprites - however they had plenty of experience in relevant fields: Their earlier sprite-based fighters were a ready reference for what they wanted the game to look like, and they underwent intensive research of how animation tricks the eye. The result is one that can't work with other types of games and takes a lot of work, but is perfectly suited for their purposes.
• When he was 13 years old, Jim Shooter realized that his family needed money, and resolved to get a job to help them out. As he was a big fan of comic books, he decided to become a writer on Legion of Super-Heroes. His parents never bothered discouraging him because they knew that he'd receive nothing but a rejection letter anyway - except DC Comics liked his scripts so much they offered him a job. He remains the youngest writer ever to write comic books professionally.
• There's a saying in Go that those who simply know Joseki (a series of standard, well-known plays) are worse than newbies. Newbies still make moves that are unpredictable, but those who simply play out Joseki are predictable. The point of knowing Joseki though is to understand when such moves are useful and when they are not to counter them.
• In 1925, Marvin Pipkin succeeded in developing an inside frosted light bulb that wasn't brittle, not knowing that the task was assigned to him as a prank as developing such a lightbulb was supposed to be impossible.
• Christopher Columbus' discovery of the Americas was pretty much because of this trope. Contrary to urban legend, both Columbus and the people he asked to fund him were perfectly well aware that the world was round and that, theoretically, one could reach Asia by going westward. However, the Earth's circumference was well-known to be such that a cross-globe journey would be ridiculously impractical with the technology of the day. Columbus thought he could do it because he badly miscalculated how big the Earth was (he thought the Atlantic was a little larger than it actually was, but didn't know about the existence of the Pacific). He persuaded Isabella of Spain to finance his journey, and did indeed find land where he expected it to be— it's just that said land was not actually Asia, but a giant landmass about halfway between Europe and Asia that no European knew existed before Columbus ran into it because he thought Asia would be there.
• Charles Martinet had never actually heard of the Super Mario Bros. series or of Nintendo when he was first told about the audition for the title character in 1990, and consequently didn't know what people's expectations for Mario were. Because of this, he was unfamiliar with the precedent that Captain Lou Albano set with his portrayal in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, and went for a high-pitched Italian voice that allowed him to stand out from the large swath of Captain Lou imitators^note he did initially consider a gruff Brooklynite voice, but quickly abandoned it in favor of something that'd more readily appeal towards younger audiences; Martinet's tape was the only one sent to Nintendo, and they accepted it almost immediately.
• Shigeru Miyamoto says that this trope is exploited when Nintendo hires people. He says that applicants being Nintendo fans already can actually hurt their chances of being hired, the justification being that people who don't have any preconceptions about what Nintendo games are or should be like will have an easier time bringing new and innovative ideas to the table. Miyamoto brought this up in an interview about a year after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game whose radical reimaginings of Zelda conventions are credited in large part to bringing in a lot of fresh blood who had no compunctions about questioning why things were done in a Strictly Formula way before. Incidentally, Eiji Aonuma, the current manager of the Zelda series, had never played a video game before when he was first hired by Nintendo, which probably inspired them to take that approach later on.
• Streamer NegaOryx went through 95 hours of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and defeated 3 of the 4 Divine Beasts (effectively end-bosses) before finding the combat tutorial shrine right outside of Kakariko Village (which you are subtly prodded to complete early in the game) and learning some "new" techniques that could've helped her.
• The 1995 Doom WAD Squares was reportedly not even playtested by its creator; they simply threw a ton of enemies and weapons on an extremely simple map and challenged people to beat it. Today, Squares is held up as the first example of a Slaughtermap, one of the most popular genres of Doom WADs.
• In the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, the winner of the women's "Super-G" (a time-trial of downhill skiing) was Ester Ledecká, who specializes in snowboarding. Because of her inexperience, she ended up taking an atypical route that turned out to be slightly faster than what the experts thought was ideal, and she edged out the expected gold medalist by one-hundredth of a second. This was so unexpected that the main US network covering the games completely missed it, and even Ledecká herself couldn't believe it. She went on to become the first person to win two gold medals in the same Olympics using different types of snow-traversing gear, making history in stunning fashion.
• Discussed by Ken Silverman, the creator of the Build engine on which Duke Nukem 3D is based. When he made it open source, he expected a hardware-accelerated port to come soon after; instead, all he found was angry people calling whoever asked for such a port an ignorant and claiming "it was common knowledge" that a hardware-accelerated Build port could not exist. Ken Silverman then proceeded to make it himself, naming it Polymost. On release, he quipped that if those angry people were right in calling others ignorant, then he had to be the most ignorant of all, because not only he kept claiming it was possible, but he actually proved it was.
• In the 1970s, British Rail were looking to solve issues relating to trains frequently derailing, and their head of research decided to recruit someone from the aeronautics field to try and get some fresh input. The job went to Alan Wickens, someone who at his interview specifically said he had no interest in or knowledge of the design of railway bogies; he later discovered that this was precisely why he was hired, so as to get a fresh pair of eyes on the issue.
• This Florida dog somehow managed to drive a car in circles for an hour with the only casualties happening to trash cans and a mailbox. Not only that, but the article half-jokingly notes that the dog probably has a better driving record than most Florida residents because it caused minimal damage and no injuries.
• Rand Miller says that he and his brother, Robyn, only attempted Myst because they were ignorant of how technologically challenging it would be to achieve their vision on the computer technology they had at their disposal^note to start off, they were working on a full-color game but only had black-and-white computers and needed to hack the Mac they were using as a graphical workstation to see color output. If they'd had an inkling of how far they were pushing against the technological limitations of the time, Rand says they'd never would have followed through.
• This thread on Tumblr showcases multiple real-life stories about bank tellers who stopped robbers without even realizing that a robbery was being attempted.
• In the music video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Living With a Hernia" (a parody of James Brown's "Living in America"), Al was able to pull off some seriously impressive dance moves despite not being a professional dancer or even attending any dances in high school. According to Al, he can figure it out just by analytically dissecting the choreography.