Jeremy Branzetti: Clinician. Educator. Scholar. Coach.

Post Update! For those interested in Productive Struggle, the Coaching for Leaders Podcast had a fantastic episode about this very topic: “The Way to Make Struggles More Productive” by Sarah Stein Greenberg

The Mythology of Career Success

Have you ever noticed how every Grand Rounds introduction makes a public speaker sound amazing? Endowed professorships, lengthy titles, pages upon pages of publications, countless honorifics… the list goes on and on. I would often view these figures as reflective of a potential “future me,” seeing their success as something that will surely come my way over time.

When things are going well, it’s easy to believe that hard work is rewarded and progress is always made. In reality, though, success is far more stochastic than orderly or logical. For example, many qualified people can apply for a job, and selection committees are composed of humans with all sorts of predilections and prejudices. Success will certainly favor those that are prepared, skilled, and interested, but it is a far less of a guaranteed than we’re comfortable admitting. And that doesn’t even touch on the topic of privilege and entrenched power structures that tip the tables in favor of white/male/cis-gendered/heterosexual.

So after a recent professional setback, this naively presumptive view of success was suddenly called into question. Was it my fault? Was it pre-ordained? Was it random luck? I honestly didn’t know the answer, and all were plausibly possible. It was in the midst of my efforts to make sense of it all, I came across a very unusual approach: The Failure CV.

What is a Failure CV?

A failure CV is pretty much exactly as it sounds: a complete accounting of all of the times you didn’t achieve something. That job you didn’t get? The promotion that was delayed? The paper that was rejected more times than you care to admit? They all go in.

Originally proposed by Dr. Melanie Stefan after a series of rejections as a post-doc, the concept caught on as a means of self-reflection, self-improvement, and paradoxically, as a kind of pick-me-up that reminds you of how far you’ve come.

What’s the point of a Failure CV?

The gist of a failure CV is this: by directly facing and assessing your non-successes, you will gain important insights that allow you to grow and improve. Armed with these insights, you’ll be better prepared for whatever challenge comes next.

To those of you familiar with Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, this may be ringing some memory bells. Briefly, Dweck identified two different approaches, or mindsets, with regards to how success is conceptualized: Fixed and Growth. Those with a Fixed mindset see success as a function of innate talent that one has, and the person has little power to alter this fate. This tends to lead to an avoidance of challenges because of the concern that failure will “prove” that you simply don’t have the right stuff. Those with a Growth mindset, by contrast, will see success as the product of effort, and thus any challenge can be overcome as long as the requisite work ethic. In this framing, challenges are opportunities to grow and improve. Most germane to this post, failure is also reframed from being a “Scarlet F” to being seen a learning opportunity.

This concept is echoed by the related concepts within education literature of “productive struggle” (Regan et al. 2019) and “productive failure” (Kapur 2014). Underpinning both is the idea that learning – and by extension, growth – is supposed to be a struggle. If it’s easy, you’re not actually learning anything meaningful. It’s something I’ve tried to drill into my residents for the last few years, but it’s also something I’m trying to internalize in my own outlook on life.

Coaching insights

After digging a bit into this concept, there are three takeaways I have on this topic that relate to coaching:

• Everyone fails in academic medicine – it’s just that we have both sociocultural and ego-driven processes to ensure that it remains well-hidden. Helping pull back the curtain on this topic can go a long way to helping people process their own struggles
• We can’t control the randomness of events that happen to us or the actions others pursue, but we can control how we respond. So, we can let failure burn us up inside, or we can be like the Master Adaptive Learners and “cognitively reappraise” our negative experiences as motivators for positive actions (Regan et al. 2022). That way, we can see struggle as a sign of growth, not failure.
• Leaders can go a long way to destigmatizing failure and motivating their teams by sharing their own failure CVs. This benefit isn’t discussed in the existing press about failure CVs, but I think there is a huge potential benefit here. By showing that the pathway to success is long and studded with mishaps, senior leaders can do a lot to help more junior faculty understand that their own struggles are perfectly normal.

My own Failure CV experience

In the spirit of this post, I went ahead and constructed my failure CV to the best of my ability. While doing this, I couldn’t help but feel that same squeamishness I had while watching my medical school OSCE video – I know it’s good for me, but boy is it uncomfortable to sit through. It’s very easy to just put it away and rationalize that you’ll “get to it later…” and then repeat in perpetuity. But if you can conjure the will to embrace this challenge, I think you’ll find it rewarding. And it may just help remind you that you always have the power to use professional challenges, struggles, and setbacks as opportunities to improve.

Below you will find a template of a Failure CV you can use. Academic CVs are maddeningly inconsistent across institutions, so please forgive me for any specific idiosyncrasies in the way I organized this one. There is no “right” way to make one of these, so please feel free to modify/improve as you see fit.