Offline: It's time to prepare your anti-CV

Abstract

Editors are merchants of failure. We trade in rejection. But no scientist cites rejected papers on their resumé. Perhaps they should. The anti-CV reveals opportunities won and lost, choices seized and refused. “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” That was Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Or try William Whewell (1794–1866): “Every failure is a step to success.” Don't be fooled by these efforts to turn failure into triumphant success. Failure is painful. It hurts. It marginalises and excludes. It's dark. And it can feel shameful. At last week's courageous Festival of Failure, led by Colby Benari, Felipe Fouto, and the Academic Careers Office of University College London, failure was warmly embraced. The goal was to destigmatise. And the message: we can all learn from failure. Failure is a great teacher. We should celebrate failure. We live with uncertainty. We survive by trial and error. And so we learn from our mistakes. The truth is that failure is endemic—in the lab, at the end of life, applying for your grant, and (of course) publishing your paper. But the festival invited an audience of largely young researchers to think more carefully about failure. What it is. What it isn't. And how we deal with it. Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist (and standup comedian) who studies voice, speech, and laughter, candidly laid out her failures. But she rightly noted that failing meant that you actually did something. Philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote about making mistakes, not failures, in his book Intuition Pumps (2013). “Making mistakes is the key to making progress”, he argued. Our mistakes are “the best learning opportunities of all”. They are “the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new”. Dennett took a Darwinian approach. “Biological evolution proceeds by a grand, inexorable process of trial and error—and without the errors the trials wouldn't accomplish anything.” He went further. “The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them—especially not from yourself.” There was more: “you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art”. “So when you make a mistake...examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage. It's not easy.” No, it isn't. “Try to acquire the weird practice of scouring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray.” But the final twist to Dennett's argument is a surprise. Don't minimise your mistakes. Encourage them. “You should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.” Medicine doesn't do failure well. A friend recently told me how one prominent UK research funder invited her to apply for a grant. The implication was that the grant was hers for the taking. She was rejected. But what was worse was the lack of feedback. She was told that she had no right of appeal. And she was barred from reapplying for funding for a year. She felt crushed and humiliated. I'm sure readers have horror stories to tell from their experiences with The Lancet. For which, genuine and sincere apologies. In global health, we stare failure in the face every day. Depending on your point of view, the Sustainable Development Goals are either risibly utopian objectives or inspiring aspirations (at a class held last week at Sciences Po in Paris, students were evenly divided between these two extremes). I have learned many lessons from my own failures at The Lancet. The most important is probably audi alteram partem (listen to the other side). But I have recently learned another lesson thanks to research recently published in Nature: Quantifying the dynamics of failure across science, startups, and security, by Yian Yin and colleagues. They showed that the traditional explanations for how failure leads to success—luck and learning—were insufficient. They found that even with the apparent absence of differences between two agents, they may still experience fundamentally different outcomes. They concluded their paper with a quote from Thomas Edison (1847–1931) that should cause us all to pause: “Many of life's failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.” How close were you I wonder. Perhaps that anti-CV wasn't so crazy after all.