How books on failure are basically books about success

Perhaps as a response to the torrent of books on how to succeed, books on failure have begun to be spotted in the wild. (Image: Georges Tomazou via Pexels)

There’s a certain irony to books that promise success. If everyone followed their principles and triumphed, the definition of achievement would again change to make it out of reach. Universal success is the impossible dream of a society based on inequality.

Nevertheless, the spate of titles continues. There are books on success fundamentals, habits and mindsets. There are others devoted to success at work, play, and on the stock exchange. Within these pages, or so we’re told, are the keys to unlock potential, the secrets of high achievers, and the tenets of transformation.

Perhaps as a response to this torrent, books on failure have begun to be spotted in the wild. Take Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail. It’s based on her popular podcast and contains lessons learned by her, and others such as Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, on the rocky road to the top.

There are nuggets of wise, if well-worn, advice in the book. Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you, for instance, “is to outsource your identity to a bunch of strangers who do not know you”.  It turns out that the title is a feint; Day writes that failure is “a necessary staging post on a journey towards greater success”.

In the recent In Praise of Failure, Costica Bradatan takes a more philosophical approach. We can live without success, says the humanities professor; it is fleeting and does not reveal much. What we cannot escape are our “epiphanies of failure”: imperfection, precariousness, and mortality.

Failure is not just to be found in individuals, he writes. We have to track its presence “in religion, politics, business, and pretty much everywhere else”. Society’s losers reveal as much about how their environment is structured as about themselves.

This systemic emphasis is welcome, but Bradatan’s solutions largely remain at an individual level. He draws lessons from those such as Seneca, Mishima, Weil and Gandhi to conclude that what is called for is a large dose of humility.

To enable this, he falls back on the trope of human beings as storytelling animals. We need to weave a story, he claims, that “structures our self-effacing efforts and gives them sustenance, continuity, and meaning”.

However, the chances of failure seem to be the highest for professional storytellers. The bloody-minded perseverance required to complete a book is often underestimated by aspiring authors. Other factors include self-limiting perfectionism and the vagaries of the publishing industry.

Talent? That’s overrated. “I know a lot of talented ruins,” said James Baldwin. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

Even published writers can be seen as unsuccessful, in terms of being forgotten, unread or skewered. It’s not without reason that “don’t give up the day job” continues to be sage writing advice.

As Stephen Marche puts it: “The principal question of the life of the mind has become how to make a living at the life of the mind”. In On Writing and Failure, a new book-length essay, the columnist and author dwells on the perilous nature of his profession.

Marche’s style is personal, colloquial and blunt. Businessmen are amateurs at failure, he says -- writers are the real professionals. “Failure is the body of a writer’s life,” he emphasises. “Success is only ever an attire.”

To begin with, there is the near-impossibility of using words to precisely convey meaning. For Marche, “intention never aligns with result”. Flaubert was aware of this. “Language is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to,” he wrote, “while we long to make music that will melt the stars”.

Writers live in a state of submission, continues Marche, cleverly conflating two meanings of the word. “Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.” What if you’re accepted? That’s no cure, he answers. Success only alters to whom, or what, you submit, and “rejection is the river in which we swim”.

There are examples galore of well-known writers in abject states, and Marche mentions several of them. A beleaguered Anna Akhmatova begs her friends to memorise her lines because she is too afraid to write them down. An impoverished James Joyce teaches English in a Trieste school. A desolate Scott Fitzgerald thinks of himself as unsuccessful, after having published This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby.

Having said that, the book repeats two words as a refrain and a motto: no whining. “You have to write. You have to submit. You have to persevere. You have to throw yourself against the door. That’s it.”

What Marche touches upon but doesn’t expand is that writers have different definitions of success. It could be the simple satisfaction of being published. It could be critical acclaim, appearing on bestseller lists, or gaining influence. For some, success is about discovering what they have to say and for others like Graham Greene, it is about reducing a chaos of experience to some sort of order.

In a market-driven society, sales, popularity and revenue are common metrics of achievement, not just for writers but other trades, too. Success on these terms, according to many, is what gives life meaning. A better place to start would be to discover what activities make life feel meaningful in the first place, for the individual as well as the collective.