She was FIRED for making a typing mistake. That “mistake” made her $47.5 MILLION. What really happened to Bette Nesmith Graham… What if I told you that a divorced, broke secretary in 1950s Texas—earning just $300 a month—was fired from her job for typing the wrong company name? What if I told you that the very mistake that cost her everything would later make her one of the wealthiest self-made women in America? Dallas, Texas. 1954. Bette Nesmith sat at her desk at Texas Bank & Trust, fighting back tears. Again. She was a single mother raising her young son alone. A high school dropout. Living paycheck to paycheck. She couldn’t afford to lose this job—but there was one problem she couldn’t hide anymore. Her typing was terrible. The bank had just introduced brand-new IBM electric typewriters, and they made everything worse. One wrong keystroke meant retyping an entire page. Sometimes several. There was no clean way to erase mistakes. One error could destroy hours of work. And every error felt like another step closer to being fired. Then one December afternoon, something small—but strange—caught her attention. Outside the bank, artists were painting holiday decorations on the windows. When they made mistakes, they didn’t panic. They didn’t start over. They simply painted over the error and kept going. A question hit her like lightning: Why can’t I do that with typing? That night, standing alone in her tiny kitchen, Bette mixed water-based paint in her blender. She tinted it to match the bank’s stationery, poured it into a nail polish bottle, and grabbed a tiny brush. The next morning, she brought it to work in secret. The first time she painted over a typo, her hands shook. If it failed—if anyone noticed—she knew she’d be fired. But it dried perfectly. Invisible. Undetectable. Her boss never noticed. But the other secretaries did. Soon, she was mixing bottles at night, selling them quietly, hiding them in desk drawers. She called it “Mistake Out.” What started as desperation was turning into something else—something dangerous. Then one day, exhausted and distracted, she made the worst mistake of all. While typing a routine letter for the bank, she signed it with the wrong name. Not the bank’s name. Her company’s name. She was fired immediately. What happened next is where everything changes. Continued in the first comment below 👇👇
2026/01/07
