Failure Resume Practice
Document your failures to normalize setbacks and maintain perspective
The Failure Resume Practice is a simple but powerful tool where you maintain a running document of your professional and personal failures alongside your regular resume of accomplishments. Inspired by scientist Melanie Stefan's argument that young people in any field are done a disservice when they only see their role models at their peak, Grant maintains a three-page failure resume that includes schools that rejected him, jobs that denied him, creative projects that failed, and other setbacks. The practice serves multiple purposes: it reminds you that success rarely happens without prior failure, it keeps you humble by counterbalancing the natural tendency to only remember wins, it provides perspective during current setbacks by showing that past failures did not prevent subsequent success, and it helps combat the impostor syndrome or alternatively the inflated ego that can come from accumulating accomplishments. Grant also uses it as a teaching tool to show students and younger professionals that the path to achievement is paved with failure. The practice takes very little time to maintain but provides ongoing psychological benefits by keeping your relationship with failure healthy and productive.
- Visible success creates an illusion that conceals the failures that preceded it
- Documenting failures normalizes them and builds resilience for future setbacks
- The more you accomplish, the easier it becomes to face failure because you have proof that failure is not permanent
- Sharing your failures with others helps them develop realistic expectations
- You rarely do anything that does not fail radically before achieving some success
- Create Your Initial Failure ResumeSet aside 30 minutes to write down every significant failure you can remember from your career and personal development. Include rejections from schools, jobs, and opportunities. Include projects that failed, investments that lost money, relationships that ended, skills you tried to develop and abandoned, and goals you set but did not achieve. Be thorough — the goal is a comprehensive record, not a curated list. Aim for at least one page; Grant's runs to three.Pro tipStart with the failures that still sting. Those are the ones your ego has been trying hardest to suppress, and they are the most valuable to document.
- Update It RegularlyEach time you experience a new failure or setback, add it to your failure resume within a week while the details are fresh. This ongoing practice prevents the natural tendency to edit failures out of your story over time. It also transforms the experience of failure from something to be hidden into something to be documented and learned from. Over time, the failure resume becomes a powerful record of your resilience and growth.Pro tipReview your failure resume before starting any ambitious new project. It provides perspective that past failures did not prevent past successes, so current failures will not prevent future successes.WarningDo not use this as an exercise in self-flagellation. The tone should be honest and matter-of-fact, not punishing.
- Share Selectively to Inspire OthersWhen mentoring, teaching, or advising people who are earlier in their career, share relevant portions of your failure resume. This serves two purposes: it gives them realistic expectations about the path to success, and it gives them permission to fail without feeling like failures. Grant uses his failure resume in teaching contexts to show students that the person they see as successful has a long record of setbacks behind their accomplishments.Pro tipThe most powerful failures to share are the ones that directly preceded your biggest successes. They demonstrate the connection between failure and achievement most clearly.
Grant wrote a complete 103,000-word draft of his first book, only to have his literary agent tell him it was unreadable — essentially a hundred research papers strung together. He threw away 102,000 words and started over, this time writing as he taught rather than as he wrote academic papers. This failure, documented in his failure resume, preceded his career as a bestselling author.
Grant adopted this practice after reading about scientist Melanie Stefan who proposed that academics should maintain CVs of their failures to combat the misleading appearance of smooth success trajectories. Grant resonated with the idea because he had his own history of significant failures including throwing away 102,000 words of his first book draft — effectively the entire manuscript — before writing a successful version. He realized that he had edited these failures out of his own narrative, which made his success seem inevitable rather than hard-won. Maintaining the failure resume became a deliberate practice to counteract this natural editing and to provide perspective during new challenges.