“CV of Failure”

I recently came across an article making the case for keeping a “CV of Failure.” In academia, it’s common to maintain a CV with a long list of one’s successes — we make the list as long as possible, highlighting the tiniest successes. That makes it easy to forget (or perhaps hide) the reality: that most things don’t work out. For people early in their careers, that can be discouraging.

While I doubt anyone’s ever looked at my CV and felt intimidated, I still thought it would be honest — and maybe even useful — to share some of the things that didn’t go as planned. It also helps me remember that getting a grant usually means applying multiple times. Sometimes five. Sometimes more.

Many of these projects were collaborations, and I’ve marked grants with an asterisk if I wasn’t the lead author on the proposal. I’ve included them only when I played a substantial role in writing or managing the application.

Computing Resources

Federal Funding

Federal Postdoc Fellowships

Telescope Time

Departmental Postdoc Fellowships

Ph.D. Programs

Federal Ph.D. Fellowships

Takeaway

I’d like to say I learned some pattern or lesson from my experience… but if there is one, I haven’t found it. Some of my best efforts were rejected, and a few that felt rushed or uncertain ended up getting funded. It doesn’t seem especially meritocratic — if anything, it feels random at times.

I’m reminded of the essential role of luck in success, nicely outlined in this graduation speech by Michael Lewis, where he talks about the illusion of merit and how we tend to overlook randomness in success stories:

People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck – especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.

I wrote a book about this, called “Moneyball.” It was ostensibly about baseball but was in fact about something else. There are poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball, and they spend radically different sums of money on their players. When I wrote my book the richest team in professional baseball, the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120 million on its 25 players. The poorest team, the Oakland A’s, was spending about $30 million. And yet the Oakland team was winning as many games as the Yankees – and more than all the other richer teams.

This isn’t supposed to happen. In theory, the rich teams should buy the best players and win all the time. But the Oakland team had figured something out: the rich teams didn’t really understand who the best baseball players were. The players were misvalued. And the biggest single reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient attention to the role of luck in baseball success.… [The players] were doing exactly the same job that people in their business had been doing forever. In front of millions of people, who evaluate their every move. They had statistics attached to everything they did. And yet they were misvalued – because the wider world was blind to their luck.

This had been going on for a century. Right under all of our noses. And no one noticed – until it paid a poor team so well to notice that they could not afford not to notice. And you have to ask: if a professional athlete paid millions of dollars can be misvalued who can’t be? If the supposedly pure meritocracy of professional sports can’t distinguish between lucky and good, who can?

Michael Lewis

The same lesson applies here: effort doesn’t always lead to success, and rejection doesn’t always mean the work was bad. A lot depends on timing, reviewers, priorities, and things outside our control. That doesn’t make the failures any less frustrating — but maybe it makes them easier to understand.