Have you ever heard of a failure résumé? Reflecting your failures can remind you of how they’ve made you stronger. You’ve tried, failed, gotten back up again, and learned from your mistakes. 

 

As a leader, delineating your past failures can also be a powerful way to assure your team that it’s okay to take risks and innovate. After all, if you treat everything like it's precious, you will never have any breakthroughs.

 

That’s why I promote writing such résumés in the "Innovative Thinking" course I teach for grad students at the University of Maryland.

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Here are some highlights from mine. 

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• I was fired from my first post-college job. My boss and I were working late, and he mentioned he was sleepy. I offered that I had a secret trick up my sleeve, and proceeded to punch him, hard, in the shoulder. It was a technique I’d developed with my best friend to stave off drowsiness on a recent cross-country road trip. I genuinely didn’t perceive it as violent in the slightest. Perhaps my most embarrassing mistake of all time.
   

• As the lead organizer for a renewable fuels conference in 2008, I accidentally overspent on a venue that I was told would be free. I ignored the problem, figuring we could sort it out with our host afterwards. Nope. 
   

• In 2013, I started Dioramalove, a company that turned photos into shoebox dioramas. I paid someone to build me a website, bought ads on Google, and pitched the idea to anyone who would listen. During customer discovery, fifteen people enthusiastically offered to be my first client. Only one single paying customer showed up in the first month after I launched. I folded up shop, grateful that I knew when to walk away.
   

• I self-published a coffee-table book, Portraits of the Poemed, of photos and stories about the strangers I'd written poems for in front of D.C.'s National Gallery of Art. After reading lengthy how-tos on getting published, I challenged myself to submit it to 50 publishing houses and literary agents. Most didn’t bother to respond. Twelve of them acknowledged me with form-letter “Uh-uhs.” Not a single one picked it up. One gave me this sage advice: “You’re nobody. If you want to sell a book on the mass market, come back when you have 100,000 followers.”
   

• An illustrator friend in Germany offered to help me with visual design for Stiktionary, a game I'd invented, in exchange for a share of any eventual royalties. We debuted it at a conference. Four big game companies were interested, and I saw dollar signs. Despite our shared agreement to go for glory and not for riches, I decided that I'd done more of the work than our split specified and proposed that we renegotiate. My friend was pissed. He demanded immediate payment for his work, at market rates. The vibe was killed, and I was out thousands of dollars and a valued friendship. It wasn't until months later that my friend and I were able to talk through the disagreement. We both apologized were thankfully able to reconcile with each other.
   

• The first recording of my 2022 TEDx talk was a complete flop. I mean, dang. When I arrived, I was surprised to find the studio had set up the slide monitor behind me, where I couldn't use my photos for visual cues. It threw me way off, and I blew it. Afterwards, I summoned all my humility and requested a do-over the next day. I’m so glad I did! With my slides images printed out and taped to the wall next to the video camera, I nailed it. Watch my eyes about halfway through. You'll see me looking up and to the left, as if to an audience in the balcony. I'm actually facing only the cameraperson, who's standing between two columns of the 8.5x11 printouts of my presentation deck.

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[An abridged version of this piece originally appeared in Phrantone 09-2023, the February 2023 issue of my real-mail newsletter.]