How to fail

You shouldn’t need any specific guidelines on how to fail, but in the interests of fairness and balance I’m going to write a blog post on that very subject. I’ve specified how to succeed, and it seems only right that I outline exactly how to fail. So If you’re intent on failure, this might be just the information you’ve been looking for.

Firstly, do not plan to succeed

First and foremost, if you want to fail at a particular thing then you must not, under any circumstances, have a clearly defined plan to succeed. If you find yourself musing on success, or outlining a plan of success, or worst of all, writing down such a plan, then you must stop short immediately. Go no further with that thought process. Do not plan to succeed. That way lies only success, not the failure that you so fervently desire.

In fact, far from having a clearly defined plan, it’s infinitely better to flit from one aim to another in such a way that you not only confuse yourself, but also any outside forces that may assist you. Be vague. Be contradictory. Shift aimlessly and pointlessly from one plan to the next. Be so unpredictable and undirected that you make it virtually impossible, even accidentally, to meet with success.

Be vague … be shiftless

And of course, if you are intent on failure, maintain a complete lack of faith in success. Don’t, for even a moment, hold any thoughts of success in your mind, much less focus intently on such thoughts. Aim instead for a vague and shiftless indifference to the subject. Be unfocused. Strive to maintain an attitude of apathy.

And this thing you aim to fail at, do not, whatever you do, focus on the end result, unless you can manage to see that in a negative light. If you must look into the future, see yourself failing. Imagine, as vividly as you can manage, that all your efforts will be in vain and that you will ultimately meet with disappointment. Try to imagine all that can go wrong and visualise, if you can, each of these eventualities playing out to an unsuccessful conclusion. If you must expect anything, expect to end up suffused with a feeling of apathy, or just lost in a haze of confusion and aimlessness.

Expect failure!

Assume you will fail, and in an effort to bring about that end result, work steadily towards … well, not working steadily. It’s not enough to know how to fail and just assume that therefore you will fail, you really must try hard not to work steadily, on a day-by-day basis, on the goal you wish to fail at. Creeping up on success, stealthily, is sure to scupper your efforts at failure.

Actually, this part should be easy, if you’ve been paying attention. Do NOT make steady progress towards the realisation of your goals (that is, if you’d actually been aiming for success, which you’re not, obviously … come on, try to keep up, your aim here is failure, remember?). Therefore, if you must make progress, make it haltingly. Make it sporadically. Make it grudgingly. And when it starts to materialise, in spite of all your efforts to conform to these guidlines on how to fail, simply do not believe it is happening. Just refuse to believe the evidence of your own eyes! Assume it is no more than a blip and carry on, unsteadily, towards your inevitable failure.

‘Act as if …’

Now, to cap it all off, remember the power of ‘acting as if …’, and make a special effort to act as if you WILL fail, and as if you have NO CHANCE of success. If you must actually bother to get dressed, for example, do not take care to look as though you care. Dress like a loser. Be slovenly. Adopt an air of failure and expectation to fail. If you do this, and you manage to keep it up over an extended period of time, you can be assured success will be kept permanently out of your reach.

Be a slob!

And don’t bother to eat properly, it goes without saying. Don’t waste your valuable slob time exercising either. Looking after your health and fitness is only likely to contribute to your success, which would be counter-productive. So naturally you will need to pay scant attention to your diet, living almost exclusively on junk food and scraps. Empty calories should be the order of the day, washed down with barely any water at all. Do your best to maintain a state of near-dehydration. This should ensure that you have virtually no chance to produce the kind of clarity of thought necessary to achieve success.

There, that should do it. Carefully follow these guidelines on how to fail (or, better still, carelessly and without any well defined plan) and failure should be virtually guaranteed. I think I’ve covered everything you need in order to fail dismally. I may have missed one or two things, but I assure you that was intentional; I didn’t really want to successfully write the definitive blog post on achieving failure as that would have seemed somehow hypocritical. So just go along with the points I’ve listed more or less vaguely and haphazardly, and see how you get on. With a bit of luck you should find that success will forever be no more than a fractured and half-baked dream, and nothing more. And needless to say, it will stay permanently just out of reach.