Write a Failure Résumé to Learn What Makes You Succeed
By any measure, Johannes Haushofer is an astounding success. He graduated with honors from Oxford and has not one but two PhDs, in economics (from the University of Zurich) and neurobiology (from Harvard). Now an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, he has published so widely and presented at so many conferences that his academic CV runs a full seven pages.
So it’s a little funny, and more than a little revealing, that Haushofer recently lit up the Twittersphere when he published a “CV of Failures” — a long list of all the “degree programs I did not get into,” the “academic positions and fellowships I did not get,” and the “paper rejections from academic journals.” Basically, in a world where most of us seek attention and acclaim with lists of our triumphs, Haushofer shared with the world a detailed accounting of his disappointments and setbacks.
In the introduction to the unusual resume, Haufhoser notes that he didn’t come up with the idea himself. A few years ago, Melanie Stefan, a postdoc at Caltech, wrote an article for Nature titled “A CV of Failures” after she got rejected for a fellowship to which she’d applied. Stefan, like Haufhoser, is a person of tremendous achievement, but she realized that for every hour she’d spent working on something that succeeded, she’d probably spent six hours working on something that failed.
The problem with ignoring those setbacks, Stefan concluded, is that it leads to false perceptions of how success actually works. “As scientists, we construct a narrative of success that renders our setbacks invisible both to ourselves and to others,” she wrote. “Often, other scientists’ careers seem to be a constant, streamlined series of triumphs. Therefore, whenever we experience an individual failure, we feel alone and dejected.”
What a healthy dose of common sense — and a refreshing blast of honesty. In a world defined by hypercompetition and intense pressure, where business breakthroughs and career advancement demand a willingness to take risks and defy convention, the notion that any person can achieve meaningful success without experiencing setbacks and disappointments seems hopelessly naïve. A willingness to chronicle your failures helps to create the kind of resilience that allows you to get beyond them.
That’s true for companies as well as for individuals. Bessemer Venture Partners, one the country’s oldest venture capital firms, has won big by funding some wonderfully successful startups, most recently companies such as LinkedIn, Yelp, Pinterest, and Blue Apron. Over the years, though, it also chose not to invest in deals that would have led to outrageous returns, including Apple, eBay, and FedEx, which it passed on seven times.
At most VC firms, these missed opportunities would be treated as dirty little secrets. At Bessemer, they are entries in its publicly available “Anti-Portfolio” — basically a Failure Resume for its partners.
Here’s the entry on not investing in PayPal: “David Cowan passed on the Series A round. Rookie team, regulatory nightmare, and, 4 years later, a $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay.”
Here’s the entry on not investing in Lotus and Compaq: “[Legendary VC] Ben Rosen…offered Felda Hardymon the chance to invest in both Lotus and Compaq Computer on the same day. Says Hardymon: ‘Lotus wasn’t proven yet, and I was worried about the situation there. As for Compaq, I told him there was no real future in transportable computers since IBM could do it.’”
Here’s the entry on not investing in Facebook: “Jeremy Levine spent a weekend at a corporate retreat in the summer of 2004 dodging persistent Harvard undergrad Eduardo Saverin’s rabid pitch. Finally, cornered in a lunch line, Jeremy delivered some sage advice[.] ‘Kid, haven’t you heard of Friendster? Move on. It’s over!’”
I don’t know how many of us are prepared to reckon so openly (and humorously) with mistakes or missed opportunities, let alone share them with the world. What I do know is that many of us carry overly simplified ideas about the logic of success and how it unfolds, and that those false narratives often stand in the way of actually succeeding.
The renowned historian Arnold Toynbee famously quipped, “Nothing fails like success when you rely on it too much.” We may have entered a world in which nothing succeeds like failures, especially if you are honest about them. Indeed, the very last entry in Johannes Haushofer’s list of setbacks is what he called his Meta-Failure: “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”
So don’t rest on your success. Go ahead and write your Failure Resume.
Bill Taylor is the cofounder of Fast Company and the author, most recently, of Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways. Learn more at williamctaylor.com.
Write a Failure Résumé to Learn What Makes You Succeed
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