This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Professional failures? Rejections? We’ve all had a few . . .’

Farrah Storr
My first ever job, I almost got fired. It was a real wake-up call. At the time, it was absolutely mortifying and I was so ashamed. But it really got me into shape very, very quickly.

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It with me, Isabel Berwick. This week, we’re talking about all the jobs you’ve failed at or maybe didn’t get in the first place. Failure’s a big part of everyone’s life, but the problem many of us face is that we automatically equate experiencing failure with being a failure. We view it as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about, something to be avoided or concealed. Today, I want to find out what happens if we look at failure in the workplace as an opportunity to grow. I’ve talked to Farrah Storr, head of writer partnerships for Substack UK, and she was previously the editor of the UK edition of Elle, Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health. And in her recent piece, What Goes on Behind a CV, Farrah tells the truth about what went on behind the scenes in her very successful career.

Farrah Storr
I got to this place where I thought I’ve been spending my entire career working towards, and I just wasn’t very good at it, just was struggling from the very beginning. I think it would have been easy to say that I made a balls-up of that job because I had a very difficult, incredibly demanding boss. But actually, I never thought that that was very helpful to blame the boss because I couldn’t control her. The only thing that I could control were my actions. The only thing that I could investigate were what weaknesses had I brought to this job which actually didn’t put me in good stead. I think what happened is I took on a job which was too big for me. My ambition was so great that I didn’t quite look at the capabilities I had at that time. And for a very long time, I didn’t want to look back over what happened. I was very ashamed. But actually after a couple of years I made real peace. I just wasn’t good enough. What I had to do was I had to figure out, well, what if I had that job all over again, what would make me a success at it? The interesting thing is now, when I wrote about this, a colleague who used to work with me on that magazine emailed me and very kindly said, “I don’t think it was all about you. It was a very difficult working environment and we had a very tough boss”. And actually, I think once upon a time those words would have been very comforting to me to blame somebody else for my failing. But I just didn’t think there was any use in blaming a bad colleague or a bad boss. But look, everybody makes mess-ups in every single job they do, and I’m sure I did it in every editorship that I took on and in every writer’s role. And I probably still do it now.

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Isabel Berwick
Today, I’m joined by my FT colleague Brooke Masters, who’s the FT’s US investment and industries editor, and associate editor. Brooke, welcome back.

Brooke Masters
Thanks for having me.

Isabel Berwick
So I’m really interested in what Farrah said there. One thing struck me that her ambition was enormous, but she wasn’t up to the job. And I think that’s the first time I’ve ever thought structurally about the fact that our ambition is different from how good we might be at the job. Is that something you’ve thought about?

Brooke Masters
I have, because when I’ve been a hiring manager, you often get people desperately wanting a job that they clearly aren’t good at. You know, somebody who has been an investigative reporter who really digs into things and this sort of one-thing-at-a-time person applies for a job that requires spinning plates and multitasking. As a hiring manager, you know this person is gonna be terrible at it, but they desperately want it for some reason.

Isabel Berwick
So there’s a sort of lack of self-awareness maybe on many of our parts.

Brooke Masters
Absolutely. I think particularly when whatever the job is something that is seen as prestigious. Similarly, you know, somebody who’s really just not that great with people will feel this great desire: I must manage other people, because that’s what people do when they succeed, when in fact they’re somebody who’s terrible at it. But they feel in order to advance, I must do this.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. And the other thing I thought was interesting was the fact that she realised that she blamed the boss at the time, but actually the only thing she could control were her own actions. And I think that’s something I came to very late in my career. Obviously not when you were my boss, Brooke, because you were excellent. But you know, at other times in my career I’ve been so quick to blame the boss. And actually, that’s not a very mature way of looking at it.

Brooke Masters
I also think in some ways it’s not particularly helpful because the only way to change the boss is to quit. And if you like the industry, you like the company, don’t love the job, it doesn’t make sense to sort of say, “Oh, my boss is horrible”. I had a truly dreadful boss years ago who was famously terrible with people, but a really genius copy editor. So he was really great with words and what he did with the text was brilliant. He was mean and nasty, and when they put me in the job, they said, “We know he’s mean and nasty, and we’re using you to test whether he can get any better. We’ve sent him to management training”. I mean, they literally told me this as they put me on the desk, and it was awful. You know, I went home and cried many nights. But in that case, I ended up thinking, “OK, I have to get the skill that he has. I want to be really good with copy because my writing at that point was not as good as my reporting. I’m gonna get it out of him. And then as soon as I feel like I’ve gotten that, I’m gonna go get another job”.

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Isabel Berwick
I think that’s really interesting, and I think being able to analyse what the component parts of the job are and how we’re doing in that job is something that’s perhaps been lacking in being very intentional about our careers until now, and Farrah’s really highlighting these things. And I also asked her whether our expectations of a job can lead to feeling failure if the reality doesn’t match up to that.

Farrah Storr
I think when I was going into the job market, I thought jobs were a job title and a pay cheque that you got at the end of the month. The reality is that’s such a tiny — though they are important things, by the way, because status and money is important to people — but they’re actually a sort of microscopic part of the job that you are doing every day. The reality is jobs are the people you’re paid to work alongside. They’re the values of the company you’re working for. And I don’t think when people go into jobs, they think about that. We are trained to think about what’s the salary, what are the benefits, and what do I get to tell people around a dinner party? The reality is those things you spend very little time examining your pay cheque at the end of the month, unless you’re very junior, and of course, then you obsess about it. But as time rolls on, you don’t look at it so much. You know, you look at it and go, “Have I got enough money to survive? Great”. And the dinner parties — well, you rarely go to dinner parties and it registers with people for a minute. And so I’ve always found it very weird that we focus so much particularly on the status attributed to jobs when actually we should be looking at the sort of microscopic parts of a job. Even what you wear to work, you know, do you have to wear a uniform? Are you allowed to wear trainers? These actually are really important things that we never put a value on, and I think we probably should. I always thought that I would want to be an editor in New York. And again, this goes back to money and status, because when I was coming through as a journalist, that was the apex of success. That’s what signalled to other people success looked like. You had a corner office, like a Tina Brown. The interesting thing is that actually when I became an editor, I was offered and turned down on three separate occasions editorships in New York. And the first time I did it, it was very difficult to figure out exactly why I had done that. But the truth was it was all about telling other people that I was gonna be an editor in New York. Actually, the idea of going to work on a glossy magazine in America didn’t sit right with me.

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Isabel Berwick
But why do you think we’re so afraid of failure? Is it tied up with high-performance culture and this idea of status that Farrah talks about?

Brooke Masters
Absolutely. Her idea of what do you say to people at dinner parties really resonated with me. It’s also what your parents say when you come home. I think, particularly in the early part of your career, the people you look up to and what they expect of you tends to get too much power in how you think about what you wanna do. Any number of people I know have taken jobs because they thought it would make their family proud. It’s such the wrong choice to take a job because it will make other people go, “Oh wow, what a great job!” and not, “Oh, I want to go to work every day”.

Isabel Berwick
I wonder if that’s a generational thing. I think in our generation — you know, we’re both Gen X — that was really prevalent, but I sort of get the impression that people coming into the workforce now are much more independent-minded. Has that been your experience?

Brooke Masters
Yes and no, I think. They are more independent-minded in their definitions of success, but they also are highly, highly attuned to status and being told whether they’re doing a good job. I think they want an enormous amount of feedback. “I’m great. Why am I not great? How can I be better?” So I think it cuts both ways. I think they have slightly different definitions of success than perhaps we did because remember, we came out into a recession, I think, like a job that paid you good money was pretty exciting. And they maybe want purpose and broader things, but once they’ve got it, I think they are as or even more insecure about being happy in a job. Is this the right place? I mean, does it look good to my friends?

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, because I suppose social media means that you can see what all your friends are doing, whereas we were just working in a vacuum.

Brooke Masters
Absolutely. I think there’s an awful lot of performance involved in how people live their lives. I think it’s getting a little better, you know?

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I think so. And have you ever been rejected for a job you really wanted?

Brooke Masters
There’s a job I’ve wanted my whole life, but I’ve never gotten, and I actually came in second for. I went to university thinking I would either be a journalist or a lawyer. And the way to combine the two, of course, is to cover the US Supreme Court, which is the most prestigious legal job in America. And I spent 15 years at the Washington Post getting in line for that. I covered the lower courts. I covered things that would make me look good for that. The job finally comes open and I don’t get it. The person who got it was very talented and probably five or 10 years older than I was, and so had more experience. He was clearly gonna do it for 10 years, so there was just no chance I was gonna get to cover the Supreme Court. And so I had to rethink my life and I moved on and ended up doing other things and then moved to the Financial Times, which doesn’t even have a full-time Supreme Court reporter. So that clearly was never gonna happen. And so I will never, ever cover the Supreme Court, and I still am a little sad about that, but I’ve had a really good career.

Isabel Berwick
I was gonna say, one door closes and another opens.

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I asked Farrah what her advice was on how to deal with rejection.

Farrah Storr
I think if you get rejected from a job, the natural instinct is to want to change direction immediately because you feel so bruised and offended sometimes. And I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. You might end up taking a small deviation on the path that you were on, but you don’t change direction completely. I think that’s a really dangerous thing to do. I think, the other thing when you get rejected from a job, and look, there were so many jobs I applied for that I just didn’t get. It’s very easy to take it personally. And again, this goes back to blame the other person why I didn’t get the job because I didn’t connect with the boss that was interviewing me, or I didn’t get the job because I wasn’t their sort of person. I think it’s really easy to spin that narrative to yourself because it protects you actually, it’s self-protection. And by the way, sometimes that is the case, but as I’ve got older, how I’ve dealt with rejection is sort of going, “Well look, that didn’t work out for me, but let’s figure out the person that got the job. What did they have that perhaps I didn’t have?” And let’s work towards getting those skills so that next time the situation might be different. Again, when you get rejected you have an enormous sense of loss of control. And I think the way to reclaim control is by picking the rejection apart and figuring out what perhaps you could do differently next time even if, by the way, you don’t get the job next time. The idea that you’ve come away with a plan and a piece of information that perhaps you didn’t have about yourself before you interrogated, I think that’s really vital and I think out of the ashes rises something really interesting for your career.

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Isabel Berwick
Brooke, I really like the way that Farrah talks about loss of control there. And you’ve interviewed masses of people for jobs and presumably rejected loads of them. What kind of reactions do they have and what would you advise?

Brooke Masters
The ones that are smart about it will ask, “Did I not get this job because the other person just had things I didn’t have, and would it help if I got it?” And then you can say to them, “You know, in this job, it clearly would have helped if you were more fluent in the language that’s involved. Or actually, what you really need to do is prove that you can write long analysis. You just don’t have that on your resume and you don’t have it in your writing samples, because these are obviously writing jobs”. The less self-aware people will just kind of sulk and think, “Oh, the world is prejudiced against me”. And as I said, some managers are prejudiced. And I’ve certainly come across hiring processes that I thought were not fair. But most of the time, when you don’t get a job, it’s because the other person was better than you are.

Isabel Berwick
You brought up the word sulk, which I think is really important because that’s a really common reaction to rejection. And I’ve certainly sulked myself. I got kicked out of a job interview once after five minutes because I hadn’t actually done any background reading about the job or the company. They were completely fair to kick me out, but I sulked for weeks and now I look back on that with some shame, I have to say.

Brooke Masters
I think a little bit of sulking is not terrible, you know, it makes you feel a little better. But yes, I think you have to set a timer like, “OK, I can sulk for a day and a half, now I need to go deal”.

Isabel Berwick
So you’ve been very open about your professional failure. But I asked Farrah whether people should generally be more open about what’s happened.

Farrah Storr
I don’t think everybody should be wilfully talking about all their rejections and what they got wrong, unless they feel completely secure where they are at the moment. I think that’s the thing you have to contend with. But I do think being honest with your peers is really vital because actually what it does of course is, the minute you start telling somebody or even if you’re a leader, by the way, the minute you start telling those people that work for you that I bombed out on this job. You can see a) the look of surprise in their face. But then, their sort of shoulders relax and they start being more open about what they bombed out on. And of course, what then happens is, it’s a terrible cliché now, because ultimately it’s vulnerability you’re talking about. It just really connects people. And the people you connect with at work are the people that you genuinely feel loyal towards. But I definitely would urge other leaders and people who are in a place of success to absolutely share all the jobs they went to, or some of the jobs and how it didn’t work out because it’s gonna be such a sort of burning beacon of light for those coming behind you, who can look at you on the sort of top-of-mountain of success and go, “Well, how am I gonna get from here to there?” If you tell them actually, well, the path is sort of littered with rejections and failures and a little bit of misery, it just makes it all so much more do-able for those coming behind you.

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Isabel Berwick
So maybe, those of us who are sort of more senior or kept going in our careers for longer, maybe just as there is a burden or a requirement, I think for us to bring younger people on and mentor them, there might also be a requirement. You know, it’s a good thing for us to talk about what hasn’t gone so well in our careers. It’s helpful for us. It’s helpful for younger people. But ultimately, I like this idea of vulnerability because people will open up when you talk more openly. I mean, I think that’s a good thing, generally. I don’t know. What do you think, Brooke?

Brooke Masters
I think so. I think it’s both a sense of vulnerability, also, I think it suggests confidence. If you can talk about how things went badly, as Farrah was saying, it suggests that you are comfortable with where you are now. And that, I think in some ways conveys strength of leadership in a way that very few things do. So, yeah, I absolutely think if you feel comfortable talking about your failures and share that with people, that’s really good both for the people you’re sharing it with but also for your stature.

Isabel Berwick
So admitting to failure might actually be a boss-power move.

Brooke Masters
Oh, for sure.

Isabel Berwick
(Laughs) Thank you, Brooke.

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So this episode went in a direction I was not expecting. When we talk about failure, I was sort of thinking that it was something that we should do to help younger people coming up in a way that wasn’t available to us when we were younger. You know, it would have really helped me to learn about the ups and downs of people’s careers when they seem to be so successful and glossy and amazing. But actually, what I’ve come away with is that vulnerability is an incredible skill in a leadership toolkit or indeed anyone’s toolkit, and it can make people open up to you. It can make you look like a strong leader. It can actually help you be a better leader. So, I have not got many jobs and I spent far too long in one job waiting to be elevated. But of course, the person above me never left. And so, it wasn’t so much a failure as a sort of procrastination. And I think that being much more specific about what it is that we want from our careers and being honest about whether we can do those jobs is gonna be revolutionary. It might be a bit late for me, but if you’re listening, be honest, be vulnerable and don’t take a massive job if you really don’t want it.

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Isabel Berwick
With thanks to Farrah Storr and Brooke Masters for this episode. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please do get in touch with us. We want to hear from you and we’re at workingit@ft.com or with me @isabelberwick, I’m still on Twitter. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our Working It newsletter. We’ve got behind-the-scenes extras from the podcast and stories you won’t see anywhere else. You can sign up at FT.com/newsletters. Working It is produced by Novel for the Financial Times. Thanks to the producer, Flo de Schlichting, executive producer Jo Wheeler, production assistance from Amalie Sortland and mix from Chris O’Shaughnessy. From the FT, we have editorial direction from Manuela Saragosa. Thanks for listening.

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