Failure, most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is.
Yoda
The meaning of the quote
In April 2016, Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer posted a second CV online. Instead of his degrees and awards, it listed the degree programs that turned him down, the jobs and grants he didn’t get and the journals that rejected his papers.
He had first written it years earlier for his students. In a note at the top, he explained that most of what he tries fails, but people only see the wins, so students who fail tend to blame themselves.
The list went viral, and Haushofer added one last line under the heading “Meta-Failures”.
“This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”
In the film Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker has been hiding on the island of Ahch-To for years. His student Ben Solo turned to the dark side under his watch, and Luke blames himself. He walks up to an old tree that holds the first Jedi books, torch in hand, ready to burn the tree and end the Jedi with it.
The ghost of his old teacher Yoda shows up, calls down a bolt of lightning, sets the tree on fire himself and cackles.
Then he reminds Luke of the last thing he told him on Dagobah, to pass on what he has learned. Luke had only ever thought of that as passing on his strength and skill. The quote says his weakness and his mistakes belong in the lesson too, and his failure most of all.
Luke’s new student Rey is the one who needs that failure. The story of how he lost Ben Solo can show her the mistake before she makes it herself. As the tree burns, Yoda adds that teachers are what their students grow beyond.
A failure you keep to yourself teaches 1 person, but a failure you share can teach everyone who hears it.
Action steps
You don’t need a Princeton faculty page to do what Haushofer did, only a notebook and someone who learns from you.
- Write your own CV of failures.
List the tryouts you lost, the tests you failed and the applications that came back with a no. Next to each one, write 1 sentence about what it taught you, the same habit the quote post Sometimes you win builds week by week. - Share 1 failure with someone you teach.
A younger sibling, a new teammate or a junior colleague all count. Tell them what went wrong and what you would do differently, the part Luke kept to himself for years.
Haushofer’s failures ended up teaching more people than his successes did, and yours can too.
About the author
Yoda first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 as a tiny green Jedi master living alone in a swamp on the planet Dagobah. Frank Oz, the puppeteer behind Miss Piggy, worked the puppet and gave him his voice.
In 2005, the prequel Revenge of the Sith showed how he got there. Yoda fought the Sith lord Darth Sidious, failed to stop him and went into exile.
He spent more than 20 years in that swamp before Luke landed there, and the Jedi master who had failed became the teacher who trained him.
So when Yoda tells Luke that failure teaches best, he is passing on his own failure, just as Haushofer did with his list. You can find the quote in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in the scene where Yoda burns the Jedi tree.
Resources
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Film)
- A CV of failures (Article)
- Princeton academic’s failure CV sparks debate on success (Article)
- Right Kind of Wrong (Book)
- Frank Oz (Wikipedia)
- Sometimes you win (Article)
- Mistakes are the portals (Article)
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