On Failure
The School of Life
BOOK IN ENGLISH / LIVRE EN ANGLAIS
A reassuring guide on how to overcome failure, teaching us that we can learn to fail well. This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing – in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives.
Our societies talk a lot about how to succeed: we’d end up so much wiser and calmer if we learnt how to cope better with the more likely scenario of failure. This is a book packed with dignified, sensible, kindly suggestions about how to approach failure: how to deal with friends, how to cope with enemies, how to endure regret, how to pick oneself up, how to accept oneself despite one’s flaws, and how to endure and thrive in new, less than ideal circumstances.
It’s a perfect volume for anyone who has ever had a relationship breakdown, suffered a career reversal, made enemies, bungled a project or wasted their time – in other words, for all of us.
When we fail, it can sometimes seem as if we are alone in this however, in truth, there is nothing more human than to fail – and nothing wiser and more necessary than to learn to fail well.
• Provides advice on how to be resilient and endure regret, so we can recover and move on from despair and catastrophe.
• Explores various examples of real-world failure and reminds us that we are not alone in making mistakes.
• Empathetic and real, written from the perspective of those who have failed and survived their failure.
• Chapters include: How to Deal with the Meanness of the World, What Love Really Is and Why It Matters, Finding Perspective, Fear and Self-hatred, and Self-compassion.
• For readers of ‘How to Fail’ by Elizabeth Day.
Hardback book | 12 illustrations | 204 x 136 mm | 232 pages