Why sometimes a failure can be a blessing in disguise
Short introduction to my latest white paper: My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals
In my January 2020 blogpost Be proactive, resilient & realistic! I talked about the challenges that even very famous academics have faced in their academic careers. Moreover, in our recent article Every Little Action Counts (Harzing & Sathish, 2026), we include being open about our failures as one of the example micro-practices under the “resist a hero narrative” label, in itself a specific representation of the more abstract concept of humility.
Now that I am semi-retired (see Retirement), I decided to “walk the talk” by reflecting not only on my own career failures, but also on the unexpected upsides that were associated with each of them. Whilst I am not claiming that there are upsides to every failure, our failures often represent cross-roads that can help us to reflect more deeply on the best path through the maze of our academic careers.
In my latest white paper My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals, I tell my own career story in four seasons: education, early career, mid-career, and late career. Your own challenges, set-backs, or failures will be different or may appear at a very different stage. But I do believe that the four morals that I derive in this white paper have some general applicability.
And remember, this is a story about major cross-roads in my career; it is not about the many daily set-backs that we all experience as academics. Here are three universals that you may not be fully aware of:
- Every academic gets rejections all the time; for instance, everyone experiences paper rejections, even editors of top journals see their own papers rejected.
- Everyone has difficult colleagues/collaborators; in fact, you may well be “that difficult colleague” for others. We all have different personalities and preferences.
- Every academic I know feels undervalued in their own university; especially research-active academics often receive far more recognition outside their university than within.
So, with that in mind, please join me on a journey through the seasons here: My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals. If you are curious about what happened before my academic journey even started see This little girl: message to my younger self.
Related video
Related blogposts and webpages
- My narrative career write-up
- My current passions
- Retirement
- Quality and Impact of Academic Research
- Transforming Academia
- Reflections on staff development
- REF, rankings & reputation
- Research Impact 101
- Supporting Early Career Researchers
- Supportive, inclusive & collaborative research cultures
- CYGNA - 11+ years of supporting women in academia
Copyright © 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Wed 20 May 2026 16:15
Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.
