Accepting failure can be difficult, but have you ever considered proudly displaying it for everyone to see?

Some academics are embracing the idea of a “CV of failures” – a resume listing all the jobs and accolades you failed to achieve – as a way of putting your own career into perspective while also boosting the self-confidence of others who might be doubting themselves.

Melanie Stefan said she came up with the idea earlier in her career when she was struggling to deal with the large number of rejections she was facing.

For Stefan, even earning a PhD wasn’t enough to silence her nagging self-doubts.

“I was applying to do postdoctoral work in another lab and I kept being rejected and failing and failing and failing,” Stefan told CTVNews.ca. “It made me sit down and think, why is this happening?”

Stefan, who now works as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, said it took her a while to realize that failing was a normal part of her career path.

“And it made me think, no one has ever told me that,” she said. “So that’s how I thought, maybe we should keep a record of our failures.”

When she had this revelation in 2010, Stefan published an article in Nature explaining that her regular CV -- which was supposed to be a summary of her academic career – didn’t actually reflect the efforts it took her to get there.

While it listed all the research she’d done, it made no mention of her getting rejected an estimated 90 per cent of the time she applied for research grants.

Stefan said taking the time to list her letdowns actually helped quell the “imposter syndrome” feeling of being unworthy of her position.

“For me, actually writing up my failures and dragging up all the things I had spent work and effort on and failed at – it showed me how much effort I had put into my career.”

Showcasing your shortcomings

While compiling your own swings and misses privately can be cathartic, others have taken Stefan’s idea a step further by publishing their failures online for all to see.

Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer has an impressive CV detailing his education, awards and publications – but his CV of failures might be even more impressive.

On the document, Haushofer explains his “failures are often invisible,” which gives people a false impression of things always working out for him.

“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.”

The two-page resume, which lists rejections from six different degree programs among other stumbles, ends with an especially impressive misstep:

“This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work,” Haushofer writes.

Stefan says those who have climbed past their failures to find success could help those still struggling to pull themselves up.

“If some of us who are more senior actually compile our CV of failures and publish them, that might be a good signal to give (those) who are just starting out,” she says. “Telling them it’s O.K., it’s O.K. to fail, that’s part of the process.”

So if your ego is still stinging from your latest rejection, maybe embracing your failures will help ease the blow. 

And if that doesn’t work, maybe reading about others who have made their failures public will.

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About the author: Jesse Tahirali is a journalist for CTVNews.ca who didn’t complete his undergraduate degree at Queen’s University because he was rejected, who took home the academic award for absolutely nothing in high school, and who has also applied to work at McDonald’s on more than one occasion without even receiving a call back.