If “We”, a word used sparsely during questions about success, is frequently used when the topic is about Failures, the blame game has already started.
Before you draft an essay or a script for the failure narrative in interviews, understand:
- Failures – Cultural Implications
- Survivor Bias
- Availability Bias
- Failure Narrative: Over-citation of Persistence
- Don’t Dwell on Failures: Curse of Self-Help Books
- Analyzing Failures: The Growth Mindset
Failures – Cultural Implications
For the Japanese, failure carries a much deeper psychological wound than what Americans lightly term as “setbacks.”
For Indians, a Govt. Job (IAS) or a predestined Engineering or Medicine degree holds a higher prestige than the failure-filled Entrepreneurial route, while for the Chinese, a Business failure is tolerable, with a recent Chinese OECD survey showing that 90% of the participants would give a second chance to the failed Entrepreneur.
For MBA applications, failure is not limited to the narrow scope of Entrepreneurship but includes Life Experiences.
Admissions Team - Cultural Perspective
Failures from your personal experience might be setbacks for an American reviewer, a catastrophe for an Indian reviewer, and a tolerable blip in your otherwise glowing career for a Chinese reviewer. Understanding a universally acceptable life experience independent of the reviewer’s cultural and personal upbringing is crucial to connecting with the admission team.
Survivor Bias
Search for Book titles with “How I survived a --------------“.
Now fill the blank with Divorce, Cancer, Failure, Financial Meltdown, Bankruptcy, you name it.
Have you ever seen a best-selling book – “How I lost it all” without any redeeming phrase in the end?
We all love the redemption story, not because we are the soapy sentimental type, but our hope machine depends on stories of survival.
With an evolutionary bias towards stories about survival, failures never sustain in a news cycle.
Steven Levitt, the Freakonomics author, did tackle this question directly. While reviewing Good to Great by Jim Collins – the early start-up bible for many, Steve noticed that Jim had shortlisted 11 companies from 1435 listed companies. The companies were those that picked up momentum when Jim was writing the book (2001).
He found a common trait that bound them all together – “a sense of discipline”.
Availability Bias
Unfortunately, for Jim, one of the 11 outperforming companies was Fannie Mae, which went bankrupt in 2008 and delisted in 2010 after several attempts by the government to resurrect it. Moreover, the other 10 companies underperformed heavily compared to the S&P 500 index. When a company is delisted, it is never part of the analysis, and Financial analysts do historical analysis of companies that have succeeded over a small period of time, and then try to find attributes that seem like a common trait.
This is what Books about Entrepreneurship do.
For every Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg working out of their parents’ Garage, there are thousands of other Entrepreneurs who didn’t even cross the first stage of funding.
To attribute success to “Persistence” and “Ramen Noodles” based on who became successful is a flawed approach.
Failure Narrative: Over-citation of Persistence
Essays and interview scripts have turned into those Entrepreneurship Books.
Applicants are trying to credit the usual suspect – “persistence” for their comeback.
You can do better than that.
Specificity wins over general attribute matching.
The Admission team is reading the 100th essay or listening to the same old story about Persistence.
For once, highlight your problem-solving capability. You didn’t persist, perhaps. You changed direction by analyzing the reasons for your failure. Very few applicants have that perspective, and very few actually get into Harvard.
Don’t Dwell on Failures: Curse of Self-Help Books
If you go to any self-help books from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to How to Win Friends and Influence People, to the bulk of the Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar titles, a unifying theme emerges.
Don’t dwell on Failures - a common advice MBA Admission Consultants give partly to meet the 500-word limit, where you have to include the ‘corrective action’, but mostly because it is not cool to keep sulking on your failures.
The moment has passed.
Look forward.
Learn from your mistakes.
Even superstar Entrepreneurs keep giving the same advice – “If you are afraid to fail, you will never succeed, and then swiftly change subjects to the next big venture they took off the ground.”
For the thick-skinned Entrepreneurs and Global Business Leaders who talk about Failures in such impersonal terms – why is it, you might wonder, that they never spend even 20% of their words on this crucial aspect of their life journey?
Failure is seen as an Idea Virus, and the more you discuss or analyze failures, the more the chance that you will approach your next venture with ‘negativity’.
The reality is further from this myth.
Worst Possible Results: Was it really ‘The Worst’?
Our minds are naturally working on paths of least resistance, and daydreaming about the best-case results.
If you look back at your failures, they were some of the worst results, but were they the worst possible results?
Perhaps not.
It would be a rarity if your failure contributed to a company going bust or your company losing a major client.
Sure, there was a loss of revenue.
Most contracts have penalties for delays and underperformance. Otherwise, how is it a failure? But the relationship was amended by a colleague or the supervisor with the Gift of Gab.
Even if you took a company down, don’t defend yourselves with all that silly MBA jargon about “Synergy and Team Spirit”.
Those applicants never make it to the interview stage or ruin their rare interview chance with clichéd answers.
For those who came out of the worst to a better position, they panicked and desperately tried solutions to get out of the slump.
Even a solution that allowed you to survive is a comeback.
The redemption story need not be that dramatic.
Most dramatic comeback stories are not believable, and the AdCom will file your essay with the list of fictional books for their private reading.
Analyzing Failures: The Growth Mindset
An applicant with a Growth mindset looks at challenges as opportunities for mastery.
What most applicants confuse is the difference between mastery and persistence.
To persist means to continue on a path despite failures.
Mastery is more of a mindset than an action, and how does the Admission team know?
The tone with which you write about Failure or talk about your failures will expose your mindset.
The Fallacy of Talent
Those who think that talent is fixed will make an observation about their God- given talents, and reveal weaknesses as talent deficiency.
That is a red flag.
No one is an inborn Financial Analyst or a Software Programmer.
You acquire the skills by working on your Math and Logical skills.
You don’t become a great writer by reading thousands of essays and visualizing sentences.
You write – some great, some unpublishable, but some worth keeping in your MBA Essays.
Talent once developed needs effort to sustain.
When your failure essay is not about Talent but effort, you have taken the first step in differentiating yourselves.
Criticism
Applicants who are defensive about Criticism will either not mention it in the essay or put a positive spin on their experience.
If you have failed, you will attract criticism from your supervisors, your colleagues, and your clients.
It is a natural reaction.
How you took the criticism should be the thread that you use to write about the corrective action, not the self-realization or calm reflection about events that led to the failure.
Let us be real.
When we fail, we are least likely to act like a monk.
The common thread in the criticism from different stakeholders will reveal the real reasons for your failure (lack of focus, effort, or faulty decisions).
Support
When we fail, someone else will do the rescue act. Most applicants fail to mention the role of the colleague or the supervisor who was decisive in taking over the project or helping you during the crisis.
Use them as inspiration.
What did you learn from them?
Did you consider the failure as an opportunity to persist or as a lesson to master your skills?
How did you approach the next project after the failure?
Don’t worry if writing about Failure with a growth mindset doesn’t come naturally to you. We will guide you through the writing and interview preparation process.
Related Services
- Help with editing your failure essay - F1GMAT's Essay Editing Service
- Help with scripting your How did you respond to failure answer - F1GMAT's Mock Interview Service
