I’ve seen countless ‘motivational’ pictures that look a bit like this:

I think the really interesting question is “what is that hard work?” No doubt it’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but it’s also likely to include a lot of failure.

I came across a ‘CV of Failures’ a few years ago and I thought it was an interesting concept. The idea is that you document all of your failures in the same way a normal CV documents your accomplishments. A typical CV of Failures would list the universities you didn’t get into, the scholarships you didn’t get, the jobs you weren’t recruited for, and all the failed projects you started. It was first floated by Melanie Stefan in Nature, and is now slightly more widespread thanks to Johannes Haushofer, a former Princeton professor. In the pre-amble to his own CV of Failures, he says:

Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me. As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days.

It seems CVs of Failures are more common in academia than in other fields, but I think they should be more widespread across the board. There’s merit in focusing on the character-building events that others have faced in their journeys. A normal CV would help to a certain degree by showing the alternative paths and detours en route to the final destination. However, normal CVs are written in a way that ignore failure; and in any case, they are mostly airbrushed versions of reality. This tweet comes to mind:

As well as looking at others’ CVs of Failures to understand their journey, it’s a useful exercise to build our own - not so that we can feel sorry for ourselves, but to ensure we are actually pushing the boundary. A very short CV of Failures is a sign of lack or ambition, or worse, feigned ambition. Yudkowsky’s post talks to the latter point: we may not record our own failures as failures, because ‘we weren’t trying anyway.’ An easy trap to fall into, but a dangerous one.

I’d like to see more CVs of Failures - share yours. I’m in the process of building mine. It’s easy enough to write one up, but the hard part is making sure there’s enough content to go on the page. I like cdixon’s one liner at the end of this blog post:

If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough

That’s all for now.