Start failing today. It is essential to success.

I read an article today that could have been written by me. It was titled Failure is Essential to Success. For the most part, the article was vanilla ice cream in a plain cone, e.g. there was noting new, except for a Princeton professor's remarks, who was quoted in the article because he recently published a new-fangled resume. It was a resume of his failures. I sat down this morning and started making a similar resume, not for public consumption of course. 

My resume which I use for my expert witness interviews is 10 pages long and lists all my successes, from published books to degrees and awards. If you read it, you would believe that I did everything right in a sequence of deliberate, rather than stochastic, trending successes and awards. If your resume was not as impressive, you might attribute mine to luck or incorrectly blame your self for your own failures. 

However, more than likely, I just failed more than you did. For example, my first job, according to my resume,  was a big success. However, I applied for 20 different jobs and only received one offer. I do not list the 19 companies that rejected me. My second job has a string of accomplishments after my name. I do not mention my mentor who taught me, or the 55 people that worked for me that were the foundation of everything I did. Additionally, I was a founder and president of EDC and raised $500,000 from a venture capital firm to initially fund the business. More than 50 firms rejected my presentations and I was $100,000 overdrawn from my bank when I deposited the $500K. The list could on and on. 

The marvelous characteristic of failure is once you stop slapping yourself in the face for the rejections, you stop blaming yourself, and have genuine compassion for the person who showed no vision in rejecting you. If you still blame yourself for your failures, then you have not failed enough. Keep on failing it will get better. My resume of failures will no doubt be more than 100 pages long.

I practiced the Babe Ruth rule of success. When you strike out, you dash for the dugout and when you hit a home run you trot slowly around the bases. Ruth was the king of the home runs and the king of the strike outs. He is the poster person for the notion that failure is an essential ingredient for success. My resume lists my home runs and people seldom ask about my strikeouts.

To make this day count, go fail at something.