My Resume of Failures

Remember when that “CV of Failures” went viral last year? Where a Princeton professor (Johannes Haushofer) decided to share all his scholastic fails to better “balance the record and provide some perspective” around his successes?

I’ve always thought that was incredibly raw and beautiful. Not only for such great personal reflection, but then to throw it out there for the world to ingest too! Cajones!

Here’s a clip from it:

“Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me. 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. This CV of Failures is an attempt to balance the record and provide some perspective”

(You can download it here (PDF))

So so true… Most of what’s “known” out there are all things that people have chosen to place into the world consciously, while conveniently ignoring the not-so-great things. A very popular technique, and one that’s rampant on social media like Facebook and Instagram, and even here in our financial blogging community!

But shocker: we all fail. And typically the more successful you are, the harder you’ve fallen.

Check out this list of Elon Musk’s biggest fails! And it’s only a 10-year snapshot!

• 1995: Unsuccessfully applied for a job at Netscape*
• 1996: Ousted as CEO of his own company, Zip2.
• 1999: First Paypal product (which he co-founded) was voted one of the top 10 worst business ideas
• 1999: Crashed his brand new $1 million McLaren F1
• 2000: Ousted from Paypal while on his honeymoon
• 2000: Almost died from “cerebral malaria”
• 2006: Launched 1st rocket and it exploded
• 2007: Launched 2nd rocket and it exploded
• 2008: Launched 3rd rocket and it also had a critical failure
• 2008: Both Tesla and SpaceX on brink of bankruptcy

You can’t NOT fail. Especially if you’re going for greatness.

So today I thought we’d do some of our own “balancing of the perceptions”, and share our own epic fails so that others are reminded they’re not alone. Especially since we’ve done a crap ton of tooting our own horns here on this blog lately, haha….

I’ll go first, and then it’s your turn :) Though feel free to keep them to yourselves if you’d rather… Unless you’re a blogger, in which case you must accept my challenge and publicly share them too!

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J. Money’s Resume of Failures

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(I’m swapping in “Resume” for “CV” as I still don’t know the difference for the life of me, haha…  And I will also narrow them down to *financial* fails since that’s the focus of our blog here, but feel free to adapt it however you’d like for your own purposes and reflection.)

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DIRECT HITS
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• 2017: Commissioned a series of articles for $2,800 and then scrapped them
• 2016: Overpaid for my Lexus SUV because I rushed it
• 2013-2016: Lost over $90,000 in cash due to cash flow issues (!!!)
• 2013: Invested $6,000 into a friend’s company and lost it all
• 2012: Invested $10,000 in another friend’s company and lost $6,000 of it
• 2010-2013: Launched a number of websites that never panned out despite how clever I named them ;) (TakeOurStuff.com, BlogSexier.com, GiveawaysAreSexy.com)
• 1997-2010: Spent wayyyyyyyyyyyy too much on alcohol, eating out, $40 bottles of water, cell phones, pagers (remember those?), credit card bills, and a string of mindless shopping out of pure boredom because apparently I’d never heard of the term “side hustle” before…

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WORKS IN PROGRESS
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• Being stingy with my money
• Donating more money to charities
• Treating my businesses too much as hobbies than businesses (sometimes by design, others not)
• And the hardest of all to break – feeling like an imposter. Otherwise known as “Imposter Syndrome” (when you feel like a phony and/or not smart or capable enough, despite accomplishing a lot)

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Whew – that felt good! And I’m sure I’ve forgotten over half of them too!

But as you can see, no one can escape failure as much as they try. Because to try is to fail!  That is life! And an important thing to keep in mind as we trot alongside our neighbors in the new year…

(Fun Fact: did you know that even the Joneses can’t keep up with the Joneses?)

So if you’re feeling up for it, I encourage you to come up with your own Resume of Failures today, or later in the week, and then pass it along to whomever you think it could help.

I’ll leave you with one last clip that was the inspiration for our Princeton friend here in starting his viral CV… It comes from scientist Melanie Stefan, though again, easy adaptable in your own lives.

Log every unsuccessful application, refused grant proposal and rejected paper. Don’t dwell on it for hours, just keep a running, up-to-date tally… It will probably be utterly 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.

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*Apparently after being ignored he walked into the Netscape offices with his resume in hand, but was too shy and embarrassed to talk to anyone and walked back out!

[Pic up top not me (obvi), but I feel like we’d be good friends :)]

Via Finance http://www.rssmix.com/