The things that didn't happen
Didn’t get SNL. Soul Plane bombed.
Two rejections that, in the moment, probably felt like the full stop on a career that hadn’t really started.
Kevin Hart talked about this on his new reality show, Funny AF. He’s looking for the next big comedian — and somewhere between auditions, he gets into the things that didn’t happen to him.
Except they quietly did something else. Missing SNL meant he never got locked into that orbit. Soul Plane flopping meant he had to find other rooms, other producers, other writers. He ended up somewhere he wouldn’t have looked for if things had gone to plan.
He’s now one of the highest-paid entertainers alive.
There’s a Princeton professor named Johannes Haushofer who made a list of everything that didn’t happen to him. Every rejection letter. Every application that went nowhere. Every program that said no.
He put it on the internet.
It went viral. Which is maybe the most Princeton thing that could happen — your failure CV outperforms your actual CV.
His explanation was simple: most of what he tried failed, but the failures were invisible while the successes were visible. So everyone looking from the outside assumed things just worked out for him. They’d compare his highlight reel to their own blooper reel and wonder what was wrong with them.
Nothing was wrong with them. The blooper reel is just the part nobody posts.
I have my own list.
Didn’t get promoted to Sec 4. Repeated Sec 3. Didn’t get into polytechnic. First business — built it, ran it, didn’t cash out when I should have. Then the GM role at Hired.com. Went through the whole interview process, thought I was the obvious fit, didn’t get it.
Each one stung the way only rejection can sting. The kind where you replay the what-ifs for longer than you’d like to admit.
But the Sec 3 repeat put me in a different cohort, which rewired how I thought about timelines. Not getting into poly forced a path I wouldn’t have taken voluntarily. The business that didn’t pay out taught me things no clean exit would have. And the Hired.com role I didn’t get? I eventually stopped trying to climb someone else’s ladder entirely.
I can’t tell you I knew any of this at the time. I didn’t.
The problem is we’re all keeping 2 CVs. One we show people. One we bury. The visible one has the wins, the promotions, the things that worked out. The hidden one has everything that actually got us here.
Haushofer made his hidden one public. Hart turned his into material.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos told Loki that failure isn’t experience. Loki disagreed. “I consider experience, experience.”
Hard to argue with a god of mischief.
The things that didn’t happen weren’t detours. They were the route.
