Three-Column Failure Resume
Record the failure, extract its lesson, and precommit the next move
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 99%
The Three-Column Failure Resume is a compact postmortem. In the first column, list a concrete professional failure, mistake, or poor decision. In the second, identify what it taught you, focusing on the mechanism beneath the visible outcome. In the third, state what you will do differently when a comparable situation appears. Pink warns that stopping after the first column produces self-flagellation rather than improvement. The lesson column creates interpretation; the action column creates transfer. His own example is a failed training venture. He says the deeper problem was not simply that the business failed, but that he took on a project he did not truly want and was not fully committed to. That diagnosis produced a future selection rule for projects rather than a generic fear of business failure.
Origin
Pink describes creating a failure resume of professional mistakes and explains the complete three-column version after Bartlett says a failure list sounds depressing.
Core principles
- 01A list of failures alone invites self-punishment
- 02A lesson converts an event into reusable information
- 03A future action turns reflection into improvement
- 04The underlying decision can matter more than the visible outcome
How to run it
- 1
List the event
Write one specific failure, mistake, or poor decision in the first column. Describe what happened without turning it into a judgment of your whole identity.
Pro tip Start with events you can examine with some emotional distance.
Watch out Protect confidential information if the resume involves other people.
- 2
Find the mechanism
Ask what decision, assumption, motivation, or behavior contributed to the outcome. Separate controllable causes from hindsight and bad luck.
Pro tip Look beneath the failed result to the choice that made it more likely.
Watch out Do not claim responsibility for factors outside your control.
- 3
Write the lesson
Put the transferable lesson in the second column. Make it specific enough to guide another situation without pretending one event proves a universal law.
Pro tip Phrase the lesson as a decision rule with clear conditions.
- 4
Commit the next action
In the third column, state what you will do when a similar decision arrives. Choose behavior that another person could observe.
Pro tip Include an early warning sign that should trigger the action.
Watch out A promise to try harder is too vague to test.
- 5
Reuse the resume
Review relevant entries before new projects or major decisions, then update the action if later evidence changes the lesson.
Pro tip Group entries by recurring decision pattern rather than prestige or severity.
Watch out Do not use the document to avoid all risk.
In the wild
Pink lists a failed attempt to turn ideas from Drive into a training business. He concludes that he did not actually want to operate that kind of business and was not fully committed, so his lesson concerns project selection rather than simply avoiding ventures that might fail.
→ The failure yields a rule to decline projects that do not earn genuine commitment.
Common mistakes
Writing only the failure column
Without a lesson and next action, the exercise becomes a catalogue of self-criticism.
Learning only from the outcome
The reusable insight may sit in the original decision or motivation rather than in the fact that the project failed.
Choosing an unobservable action
A broad intention cannot reliably alter the next comparable decision.
Is it for you?
Best for
People conducting a career, project, or decision postmortem after enough time has passed for useful reflection.
Not ideal for
Public disclosure of sensitive failures or reviews conducted while someone is in acute distress.
From the transcript
“put those failures and screw ups and mistakes in one column”
“in the next column you list the lesson you learned from it”
“in the third column you list what you're going to do next time”
From the episode
The Real Trick To Long Term Motivation: Daniel Pink