My previous post was about the importance of sharing your failures in order to help others, and shortly after I wrote it, I happened upon a short video by Dan Pink on similar topic:

The failure resumé.

What an intriguing idea! Let’s explore.

What’s a Failure Résumé?

A failure résumé is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of your major failures (and ideally, what you’ve learned from them). As far as I can tell, biologist Melanie Stefan came up with the idea, and it gained widespread attention when Princeton psychologist Johanes Haushofer published his.

I keep my college transcript in a desk drawer at the office.

In college, I earned two Ds and two Fs. I earned ‘em, too. They were the product of almost clinical procrastination, abysmal study skills, lousy impulse control, and a dash of math anxiety thrown in for good measure.

I’m at peace with those “bad” grades—they taught me a great deal about success—but I’ve also found a way to use them for good.

Here’s a handy five-minute exercise based on concepts from the productivity classic Getting Things Done. If you can, do this exercise right now.

1. Grab your phone and open the Notes app (or start a new Google Doc on your laptop, or find paper and pen).
2. Without stopping to censor yourself, write down everything you might want to do in the future but aren’t committed to doing right now.
   • learning French
   • running a half-marathon
   • cleaning the basement
   • reading Ulysses
   • getting a dog
   • replacing your old frying pan
   • visiting Peru
3. Clean up any typos or repeats.
4. Keep the list with you so you can add to it easily.
5. Set an alarm on your phone (or mark your calendar) to skim this list at a set time every two weeks. This will also take about 5 minutes.
6. Pat yourself on the back, because you’ve just made a Someday/Maybe list. Nice job! You’re likely feeling less stress about the future and greater clarity in your thinking about the present.

We’ve all got ideas, hopes and dreams that pile up in our head and cause anxiety. Keeping them in a trusted external system, though, lets us focus on the task at hand and live our lives with less distraction.

Think back to the most recent good day you had, a time when you went to bed confident that you’d spent one of your irreplaceable days wisely.

Maybe it was yesterday, or maybe it was a while ago.

Do you know why it was a good day? Can you put your finger on it?

We each have to answer this question for ourselves, but we do get to choose. Our answer reveals a great deal about our personal philosophy.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. — Origin unknown, often attributed to Robert J. Hanlon

When someone is making our life difficult, even in a minor way, we often jump right to a satisfying conclusion:

This person is trying to sabotage me!

Feels good, right? We have the moral high ground, and now we get to feel righteous anger (the best kind!). The thing is, true sabotage is pretty rare.