What’s On Your Failure Resume?
By: Pouya Rad, Associate Software Engineer
During my undergrad years, I was part of a program called Entrepreneur Scholars, a practical and hands-on approach to learning entrepreneurship. One of our assignments was to create a “failure resume.” A normal resume lists the things you’ve accomplished and that you’re proud of, which highlight your successes as an individual.
In contrast, this “failure resume” was supposed to be the antithesis to the typical resume. On it, we were to list as many things as we could think of that we had failed at in some capacity, which could mean failing a class, placing lower in a tournament than desired, and so on. The point is that you didn’t reach the highest level of success possible in that scenario.
Not only did we have to share our failure resumes with the whole class, but my professor also picked mine as the “best” one. How demoralizing, I thought. I mostly tuned out as my professor made a spectacle of my life’s failures for the whole class, wishing I didn’t have to witness him dissect my many failures. What could have been the point of this public humiliation?
Fail fast, fail forward
Naturally, when you push your bounds and develop yourself, there is the possibility of failing at some, if not many, things. This is what my professor wanted our class to understand. The more things that you attempt, the more likely that you are to fail. This was especially important for us to learn in the program because of how many failures we were going to endure as we learned the tenets of practicing entrepreneurship.
In my opinion, true failure comes in three ways:
- Never trying something that you might fail at, for fear of failure.
- Failing without learning from your mistakes, and then repeatedly committing the same mistakes.
- Allowing failure itself to stop you from reaching your goals. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
The aim is to fail fast and fail forward. I take this to mean (1) knowing — sooner rather than later — to cut your losses and move on and (2) learning something and advancing yourself in some way despite the initial setback. This is definitely easier said than done and takes deliberate practice.
Failing professionally
It’s not easy to open yourself up to failure and even less so in your first professional role. While Veeva may not be a startup anymore, it was only 10 short years ago that it was. With this startup mentality, “speed” is one of our core values. Working with speed while simultaneously delivering quality software is a very fine line to walk. Moving too quickly can cause critical bugs that make it into production; moving too slowly can mean missing out on opportunities or deadlines.
The fear of failure ties directly, I think, to imposter syndrome. As new grads especially, we feel the pressure to continually succeed and may find ourselves thinking that any stumbles — including the ones I previously mentioned — during our first professional roles might be career-ending. This is the imposter syndrome talking. Embracing failure as a teacher helps us to maintain a mindset of innovation and provides us with invaluable experiences and learnings that we might not have gained otherwise.
Give the failure resume a shot. See what you come up with. It might help you reflect on things you’ve learned from your past mistakes, or it might inspire you to try things that you haven’t. Getting practice with failure is the best way to be more comfortable with trying and learning new things.
