refused grant proposal and rejected paper.”
“It will be six times as long as your nor-
mal CV,” she wrote. “It will probably be ut-
terly depressing at first sight. But it will
remind you of the missing truths, some of
the essential parts of what it means to be a
scientist—and it might inspire a colleague
to shake off a rejection and start again.”
The idea inspired a flowering of fail-
ure CVs and résumés online, including a
memorable one by Princeton University
psychology professor Johannes Haushofer.
“Most of what I try fails, but these fail-
ures are often invisible, while the successes
are visible. I have noticed that this some-
times gives others the impression that
most things work out for me,” he wrote. “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.”
Ironically, the attention that Haushofer’s
CV of failures has attracted, including
mentions in the Washington Post and the
New York Times, is listed as its own “meta
failure.”
“This darn CV of Failures,” he writes,
“has received way more attention than my
entire body of academic work.”
Allowing yourself to fully feel failure
can lay the groundwork for future suc-
cess, suggests a 2017 study in the Journal
of Behavioral Decision Making. Research-
ers asked two groups of 98 people to find
the cheapest price for a specific blender
online, with a cash prize for finding the
best deal. Half the participants were told
to focus on their emotional response to
losing. The other half were told to simply
think about the details of their failure if
they didn’t win. But after the competition,
all the participants were told that they lost
and that the cheapest blender was $3.27
less than the one they’d found. The partici-
pants were then given the chance to try an-
other task, this time shopping for a book.
The group that focused on their emotional
response to failing spent 25% more time on
the next task than the group that did not,
suggesting that they tried harder.
“All the advice tells you not to dwell
on your mistakes, to not feel bad. But we
found the opposite,” wrote Selin Mal-
koc, an Ohio State University professor of
marketing who co-authored the study. “If△
One study found
that when people
embraced and
acknowledged their
emotional response
to failure, they tried
harder next time.