When we compare ourselves to successful people, it's easy to assume that they've got some sort of success gene that the rest of us don't have. But the truth is that people who are "successful," have failed at just as many things as the rest of us–they just know how to get up, brush themselves off, and try again...and again...annnnd again. 

To prove this point in a powerful way, Johannes Haushofer, an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, shared a resume that lists his failures rather than his achievements. 

To be clear, Professor Haushofer has a lot of achievements, including getting a B.A. from Oxford and a PhD from Harvard, winning a wide variety of coveted fellowships, getting papers published, and acquiring teaching positions at MIT, Harvard, and Princeton. But he's also experienced a whole lot of failure and rejection, as this CV shows. 

"Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible," he wrote. "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 world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days."

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Text, Photograph, White, Style, Line, Parallel, Black-and-white, Document, Number, pinterest

As Haushofer points out, he's not the first person to do this, nor is it his original idea. He was inspired by a 2010 article written by Melanie Stefan, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Now that his CV has gone viral, however, it's inspired other people all over the world to share their own resumes of failure, to remind people that rejection is all just a normal part of the process. 

And it's nice to know that, even if you're a big-shot professor, you can still always be humbled by your mother. 

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From: Seventeen