Member-only story
Don’t Read Self-Help Books to Know About Success
Read the ‘CV of Failures’ written by successful people and dig deeper into their stories
Success is visible, and people flaunt their successes with gusto. Nobody wants to talk about their failures. It’s not because they lack humility; people are not just interested in listening to uninspiring tales of setbacks.
Success is the most popular and bestselling self-help genre. We have thousands of titles beginning “How to Succeed………”, but very few books screaming with headlines like, “How to Fail and Then Succeed” or “Six Lessons I Learned from My Failures”.
In 2016, Johannes Haushofer, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, (now Assistant Professor of Economics, Stockholm University) took the academic world by storm by publishing a two-page CV of Failures. He began his resume of failures with a profound statement. His opening lines summarised a pearl of wisdom that the self-help industry seldom cared to examine:
“Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me. As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the…
