[The students] realize that viewing their experiences through the lens of failure forced them to come to terms with the mistakes they have made along the way and to extract important lessons from them. In fact, as the years go by, many former students continue to keep their failure résumé up-to-date, in parallel with their traditional résumé of successes.
A failure resume is a quick way to demonstrate that failure is an important part of our learning process, especially when you’re stretching your abilities, doing things the first time, or taking risks. We hire people who have experience not just because of their successes but also because of their failures. Failures increase the chance that you won’t make the same mistake again.
Failures are also a sign that you have taken on challenges that expand your skills. In fact, many successful people believe that if you aren’t failing sometimes then you aren’t taking enough risks. Additionally, it is pretty clear that the ratio of our successes and failure is pretty constant. So, if you want more successes, you are going to have to tolerate more failure along the way.I'd agree wholeheartedly. What would you put on your failure resume?
(Hat Tip to Tony Joyce)
What if we were able to develop this into a regular practice at an organization? Consider it a Worst Practice forum. It would be subversive to entrenched interests demanding success. But it could be quite powerful, a kind of Anti-Best-Practices. There is a thread running some discussions on Cognitive Edge that support the idea that Worse Practices are more realistic that conventional Best Practices.
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