Rabbi David Bashevkin
Rejection comes in all shapes and sizes. Thin envelopes, long conversations, and terse emails. Yet historically, the reactions to rejection have remained fairly consistent: self-doubt and dejection.
Of course, the type of rejection we are discussing is not the life-altering kind from doctors or spouses, but a more subtle form that chips at one’s resolve rather than obliterating it in one fell swoop. What then can be said to assuage the pain of such mundane rejection that hasn’t already been shared in countless commencement speeches? Instead of presenting quixotic notions of how pain makes you stronger (of which Conan O’Brien remarked, “Whoever said whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger failed to emphasize that it almost killed you.”), I would like to present one smaller, but perhaps more concrete idea.
After graduating from Harvard University, John Leiner received the prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant. A gifted teacher who has lectured throughout the world, Dr. Leiner is currently the CEO of the Leiner foundation. His daily insights can be found at JohnLeiner.com
Sound familiar?
I find bio blurbs very eerie, like looking at a photo-shopped family photo. Vague phrases are always used like “sought-after speaker” and “internationally-renowned” that would seem narcissistic if spoken, but are strangely accepted practice in bio blurb writing etiquette.
The absurdity of the bio blurb is only fully realized after writing your own. The first realization that immediately descends is that everyone writes his own bio blurb. Granted, we collectively suspend disbelief and pretend it came from our personal PR department, but privately we all smirk as we imagine our friends and mentors struggling over which superlatives they could convincingly describe themselves with.
If good biographies tell a proper story of non-sequential success, bio blurbs are the fun house mirrors where success is portrayed as a pristine linear progression without the blemish of failure. But a bio blurb that is merely our own ESPN highlight film of our successes sends the wrong message to others and paints a stilted portrait of ourselves.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Morgenstern, the famed rabbi of Kotzk, once said, “I like to keep my good deeds private and failures public.” Of course we should be proud of our successes, but both for a more honest reflection of life and as a sign of encouragement and solidarity to anyone who has just received a first (or fiftieth) thin envelope, perhaps we can do a better job of integrating life’s failures within our typically self-obsessed bio blurbs. It’s great to list all of your successes in three to five short sentences, but maybe if one of those sentences was a failed project, rejected application, or unexpected difficulty, even our successes would seem more lively. It may only take one sentence to remind yourself that you can laugh at yourself. It’s only one sentence to tell others that life will always have its disappointments. It’s a one sentence tribute to one of the thin envelopes you have received in your life.
I am not suggesting a major revolution, just a cute little ploy that might help paint a more accurate picture of living a “sequential” life.
In fact, I’ll start with mine.
David Bashevkin is the Director of Education for National NCSY and is pursuing a doctorate in public policy and management at The New School’s Milano School of International Affairs. He was rejected from the Wexner Graduate Fellowship. Twice.
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Tim Ferrera
NY Times
A little more than three years ago, I had to put together this presentation at work. It was on a topic I wasn’t very familiar with, but I took it on anyway, figuring I could get up to speed and deliver something useful and productive.
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Friends, if you hadn’t guessed yet, I bombed it. I wasn’t prepared enough, I missed a few major points, and I didn’t give myself enough time to complete it. Not my greatest work.
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But I have such fond memories of that presentation — O.K., maybe not exactly fond— because it was my first significant screw-up at a new job. It’s still something I look to when I’m in a similar position at work; I know what went wrong then, so I can try to fix those issues now before they become problems.
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When things go right, we’re generally pretty good at identifying why they went right — that is, if we even take time to analyze the success at all. Preparation, proper scheduling, smart delegation and so on. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But falling on our face gives us the rare opportunity to find and address the things that went wrong (or, even more broadly, the traits or habits that led us to fail), and it’s an opportunity we should welcome.
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That’s where the failure résumé comes in. Whereas your normal résumé organizes your successes, accomplishments and your overall progress, your failure résumé tracks the times you didn’t quite hit the mark, along with what lessons you learned. (And yes, my disastrous presentation has a spot on mine.)
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Melanie Stefan, a lecturer at Edinburgh Medical School, knows this well. A few years ago, she called on academics to publish their own “failure résumés,” eventually publishing her own. On it, she lists graduate programs she didn’t get into, degrees she didn’t finish or pursue, harsh feedback from an old boss and even the rejections she got after auditioning for several orchestras.
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What’s the point of such self-flagellation?
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Because you learn much more from failure than success, and honestly analyzing one’s failures can lead to the type of introspection that helps us grow — as well as show that the path to success isn’t a straight line.
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“At the time, I thought we were really not talking enough about failure” in academia, Dr. Stefan said. “I had just finished my Ph.D. and was applying for so many fellowships to do a postdoc, and I got rejection after rejection, and I said it was something we don’t really talk about a lot.”
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She added: “Sometimes I look back on them and see how much I’ve actually struggled to be where I am. That’s a powerful reminder that I deserve to be here,” she said. It “is a good reminder of how much you’ve tried.”
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(Just to be clear: Despite her failures, Dr. Stefan is indeed quite successful: She earned her Ph.D. from the European Bioinformatics Institute, she worked at Caltech and Harvard, and she has been a lecturer since 2015.)
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Failure is a topic we’ve covered before in Smarter Living. Last August, the writer Oset Babur wrote a guide to failing the right way. In it, Ms. Babur wrote that to turn even our most public failures into advantages, we need to be critical, mindful, honest and, most important, kind about what went wrong.
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Keeping a failure résumé — or Anti-Portfolio or CV of Failures or whatever you’d like to call it — is simple: When you fail, write it down. But instead of focusing on how that failure makes you feel, take the time to step back and analyze the practical, operational reasons that you failed. Did you wait until the last minute to work on it? Were you too casual in your preparation? Were you simply out of your depth?
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There are countless things that can go wrong when we’re trying accomplish our goals or advance our careers. But those things are opportunities, not derailments.
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“Even people who, on paper, have had extremely successful careers have struggled along the way, and failure is part of a career,” Dr. Stefan said. “Everyone has to go through it if you want to be successful".
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| little more than three years ago, I had to put together this presentation at work. It was on a topic I wasn’t very familiar with, but I took it on anyway, figuring I could get up to speed and deliver something useful and productive.Friends, if you hadn’t guessed yet, I bombed it. I wasn’t prepared enough, I missed a few major points, and I didn’t give myself enough time to complete it. Not my greatest work.But I have such fond memories of that presentation — O.K., maybe not exactly fond— because it was my first significant screw-up at a new job. It’s still something I look to when I’m in a similar position at work; I know what went wrong then, so I can try to fix those issues now before they become problems.When things go right, we’re generally pretty good at identifying why they went right — that is, if we even take time to analyze the success at all. Preparation, proper scheduling, smart delegation and so on. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But falling on our face gives us the rare opportunity to find and address the things that went wrong (or, even more broadly, the traits or habits that led us to fail), and it’s an opportunity we should welcome.That’s where the failure résumé comes in. Whereas your normal résumé organizes your successes, accomplishments and your overall progress, your failure résumé tracks the times you didn’t quite hit the mark, along with what lessons you learned. (And yes, my disastrous presentation has a spot on mine.)Melanie Stefan, a lecturer at Edinburgh Medical School, knows this well. A few years ago, she called on academics to publish their own “failure résumés,” eventually publishing her own. On it, she lists graduate programs she didn’t get into, degrees she didn’t finish or pursue, harsh feedback from an old boss and even the rejections she got after auditioning for several orchestras.What’s the point of such self-flagellation?Because you learn much more from failure than success, and honestly analyzing one’s failures can lead to the type of introspection that helps us grow — as well as show that the path to success isn’t a straight line.“At the time, I thought we were really not talking enough about failure” in academia, Dr. Stefan said. “I had just finished my Ph.D. and was applying for so many fellowships to do a postdoc, and I got rejection after rejection, and I said it was something we don’t really talk about a lot.”She added: “Sometimes I look back on them and see how much I’ve actually struggled to be where I am. That’s a powerful reminder that I deserve to be here,” she said. It “is a good reminder of how much you’ve tried.”(Just to be clear: Despite her failures, Dr. Stefan is indeed quite successful: She earned her Ph.D. from the European Bioinformatics Institute, she worked at Caltech and Harvard, and she has been a lecturer since 2015.)Failure is a topic we’ve covered before in Smarter Living. Last August, the writer Oset Babur wrote a guide to failing the right way. In it, Ms. Babur wrote that to turn even our most public failures into advantages, we need to be critical, mindful, honest and, most important, kind about what went wrong. Keeping a failure résumé — or Anti-Portfolio or CV of Failures or whatever you’d like to call it — is simple: When you fail, write it down. But instead of focusing on how that failure makes you feel, take the time to step back and analyze the practical, operational reasons that you failed. Did you wait until the last minute to work on it? Were you too casual in your preparation? Were you simply out of your depth?There are countless things that can go wrong when we’re trying accomplish our goals or advance our careers. But those things are opportunities, not derailments.“Even people who, on paper, have had extremely successful careers have struggled along the way, and failure is part of a career,” Dr. Stefan said. “Everyone has to go |
| little more than three years ago, I had to put together this presentation at work. It was on a topic I wasn’t very familiar with, but I took it on anyway, figuring I could get up to speed and deliver something useful and productive.Friends, if you hadn’t guessed yet, I bombed it. I wasn’t prepared enough, I missed a few major points, and I didn’t give myself enough time to complete it. Not my greatest work.But I have such fond memories of that presentation — O.K., maybe not exactly fond— because it was my first significant screw-up at a new job. It’s still something I look to when I’m in a similar position at work; I know what went wrong then, so I can try to fix those issues now before they become problems.When things go right, we’re generally pretty good at identifying why they went right — that is, if we even take time to analyze the success at all. Preparation, proper scheduling, smart delegation and so on. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But falling on our face gives us the rare opportunity to find and address the things that went wrong (or, even more broadly, the traits or habits that led us to fail), and it’s an opportunity we should welcome.That’s where the failure résumé comes in. Whereas your normal résumé organizes your successes, accomplishments and your overall progress, your failure résumé tracks the times you didn’t quite hit the mark, along with what lessons you learned. (And yes, my disastrous presentation has a spot on mine.)Melanie Stefan, a lecturer at Edinburgh Medical School, knows this well. A few years ago, she called on academics to publish their own “failure résumés,” eventually publishing her own. On it, she lists graduate programs she didn’t get into, degrees she didn’t finish or pursue, harsh feedback from an old boss and even the rejections she got after auditioning for several orchestras.What’s the point of such self-flagellation?Because you learn much more from failure than success, and honestly analyzing one’s failures can lead to the type of introspection that helps us grow — as well as show that the path to success isn’t a straight line.“At the time, I thought we were really not talking enough about failure” in academia, Dr. Stefan said. “I had just finished my Ph.D. and was applying for so many fellowships to do a postdoc, and I got rejection after rejection, and I said it was something we don’t really talk about a lot.”She added: “Sometimes I look back on them and see how much I’ve actually struggled to be where I am. That’s a powerful reminder that I deserve to be here,” she said. It “is a good reminder of how much you’ve tried.”(Just to be clear: Despite her failures, Dr. Stefan is indeed quite successful: She earned her Ph.D. from the European Bioinformatics Institute, she worked at Caltech and Harvard, and she has been a lecturer since 2015.)Failure is a topic we’ve covered before in Smarter Living. Last August, the writer Oset Babur wrote a guide to failing the right way. In it, Ms. Babur wrote that to turn even our most public failures into advantages, we need to be critical, mindful, honest and, most important, kind about what went wrong. Keeping a failure résumé — or Anti-Portfolio or CV of Failures or whatever you’d like to call it — is simple: When you fail, write it down. But instead of focusing on how that failure makes you feel, take the time to step back and analyze the practical, operational reasons that you failed. Did you wait until the last minute to work on it? Were you too casual in your preparation? Were you simply out of your depth?There are countless things that can go wrong when we’re trying accomplish our goals or advance our careers. But those things are opportunities, not derailments.“Even people who, on paper, have had extremely successful careers have struggled along the way, and failure is part of a career,” Dr. Stefan said. “Everyone has to go |
