Monica Byrne experienced the kind of success this summer that most writers fantasize about. A publisher bought her first book (The Girl in the Road, it comes out in the US and UK next year) and paid well for it. Her play What Every Girl Should Know was selected for New York's Fringe Festival and is now showing at theatres around America. As if that's not enough, she was also awarded a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship.

Yet, in the midst of all these accolades, Monica posted what she calls her "anti-resume" on her blog. It was her way of reminding friends, fans and aspiring writers what her life has really been like in recent years:

Rejection is just part of the landscape for all beginning artists … Some think that there are just some pre-ordained Golden Children who Get Everything, and that's really not the case – at least, it hasn't been mine.

She saved the many "thanks but no thanks" letters from literary publications, fellowships and theatres she submitted to over the years. When she looked back through them all, she figured out that her "success rate" was a mere 3%. She was even turned down from three creative writing master's programs.

I wish more people would make anti-resumes.

It's refreshing in an era where we mostly see our friends' and acquaintances' triumphs: their resumes and promotions via LinkedIn, their television chef worthy dinners on Pintrest and their smiling family and vacation photos on Facebook. We are all PR spin masters about our lives.

Yet anyone who has ever been in the work world and certainly relationships knows that you often learn the most from your mistakes and setbacks.

One aspect of my resume that often gets people's attention is that I'm a Rhodes Scholar. What they don't see is that I also applied to two other very prestigious fellowships and didn't get them. I was a finalist. As Dale Earnhardt liked to say, "second place is just the first loser".

I didn't save all my rejection letters, but there were certainly points in my life where my application to success ratio was 20:1 or worse. I went through a phase where I seemed great at getting interviews at financial firms, but couldn't seem to land an actual job offer. Call it the career equivalent of "forever a bridesmaid never a bride". I was forever shortlisted.

When I started out in job world, they would still send you rejection letters in the mail or worse, call you on the phone. I once got one of those "we don't have an offer for you" calls when I was in Heathrow airport, which probably worked out as my red eyes could be interpreted as weary traveler syndrome. The form emails sent out today seem less personal somehow, although they're also harder to do anything fun with. Some college friends once filled a bulletin board with rejection letters, turning it into a game to point out the ones with the worst wording.

Sometimes failure is also your own doing. There's a trend in job interviews to ask people about their biggest mistakes.

I think of the story of Marjorie Scardino, the former CEO of Pearson, the world's largest publishing company. She has been listed on a number of most powerful women in business lists.

When she interviewed for a managing director job at the Economist in 1985, arguably the start of her CEO track, she basically told them to hire her because she had just finished running a weekly newspaper in Savannah, Georgia that folded. That paper won a Pulitzer prize in 1984, but commercially, it wasn't viable. She and her husband sold it for $1. Scardino outlined the lessons she learned from the failure and used all her bravado to tell her interviewers that she never makes the same mistakes twice.

She got the job. Years later, she told the Telegraph, "I learnt then that you can fail and you don't die."

Kim Ruyle, a human resources manager for three decades and president of Inventive Talent Consulting, put it this way:

The difference between successful people and less successful people isn't the number of failures they've had, but what they do with them.

At the recent New Yorker festival, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was asked about her biggest mistake in her career. I half expected her to give one of those ho-hum answers. When you work in the news industry long enough, you almost always regret a headline or wording in some story.

Instead, she paused for a few seconds and said that it's definitely been the New York Times' coverage leading up to the Iraq War and the failure to question the weapons of mass destruction. She was Washington bureau chief at the time. It's made her – and many others in her newsroom – a lot more skeptical of government.

Some people's mistakes are more public than others', and some failures are more damaging to careers or personal lives. But as a society, it's not ideal to only stress our successes. As the theme song from the 1990s TV show Friends goes, sometimes "it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year". We've all been there.

The work world today is about reinventing yourself constantly, whether after a layoff or to stay relevant now that there's less job security in many fields. There's also an increasing trend of freelancing or other "self employed" type work. Trial and error is part of the process. There will be failures and rejections.

Perhaps it's too much to hope that anti-resumes become a trend, but often, they're a lot more telling than what's on the real CV.