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

Anne-Wil Harzing - Wed 10 Jun 2026 15:53 (updated Tue 7 Jul 2026 06:55)

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.

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• 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