CV of Failures

I just listened to a recent podcast episode from Hidden Brain about learning from our mistakes and failures. Mostly the ways we think about failing and messing up. Here’s what it was about: we don’t like failures/mistakes because they make us uncomfortable so we try to ignore them and not talk about them. But what if by changing the way we think about failure, we could feel better and see failures as opportunities or even just not beat ourselves up so much? At the end of the podcast, one professor/researcher mentioned that she asks her students to make their own CV of failures. Because we put so much into our successes and shy away from talking about our failures, this is a way to really normalize failure and take the shame away. And because I’ve spent so much time perfecting my resume lately, this kind of felt necessary for me at this moment. So I’m sharing mine with you all today. 

Link to the episode: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/learning-from-your-mistakes/

Feel free to share a failure below if you’d like!

Ruth’s CV of Failures

Education
Wanted to go to Washington College for creative writing (and specifically hoped to be a finalist for the Sophie Kerr Writers Prize) but took one creative writing class and was extremely intimidated and insecure that I changed majors
Didn’t study for the SAT so I bombed it and only got into 2 colleges that didn’t care about scores
Got a D in a college stats class
Overslept for an exam
Missed many classes in grad school because of anxiety/personal crisis
Completed a thesis based on interviews with service workers’ experiences at my school. I requested a meeting with HR to share my findings and recommendations, they weren’t interested
had to go to summer school so I didn't have to repeat 3rd grade (the worst part was actually playing basketball)

Employment
Quit a job after 6 weeks 
Most recently been rejected for 5 jobs
Encouraged my organization to purchase a better/different data platform for our research and it ended up being a lot worse than the one we were using previously
Struggled with having some hard supervisory conversations with our 15 year old intern/was intimidated by him often
Mailmerge went wrong–sent an e-mail to many many people in my organization that it wasn’t meant to go to

Extracurricular 
Took 2 arabic classes/had tutors and never fully learned or finished the course
Tried to end our home alarm contract and instead was convinced to extend it another 2 years because I couldn’t say no to the sales person