I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate myself on being a failure.

It has taken years of dedication, questionable decision-making and a remarkable ability to procrastinate for me to reach this point. There were setbacks along the way, of course. Opportunities I squandered, plans I abandoned, potential that I apparently had in abundance but never quite managed to convert into anything my parents could proudly mention to relatives.

And here I am; unsuccessful, unexceptional and unreasonably comfortable with the fact that my life has not turned into a motivational LinkedIn post.

On International Day of Failure, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this achievement: my poor time management, my lack of consistency, the several versions of myself that promised to get their lives together next month, and next month itself, which has been taking the blame for years.

Most importantly, I would like to thank society for making failure such a deeply embarrassing experience that I now consider embracing it a revolutionary act.

To all my fellow underachievers, lost causes, abandoned dreamers and people who have opened a productivity video, watched eleven seconds of it and gone back to bed: this one’s for us.

We have spent enough time apologising for not becoming the people we were supposed to be.

Today, we celebrate.

The unbearable burden of having potential

Growing up, I was repeatedly informed that I had potential by teachers, relatives and neighbours. Potential followed me around like an unpaid debt.

The problem with potential is that it never lets you enjoy anything. You cannot simply be a child who enjoys drawing terrible dinosaurs. One good drawing and you must be a future artist. You cannot enjoy writing a silly story. One readable story and you must be the next great author. You cannot be good at absolutely nothing in particular. You must find your passion, monetise it and build a personal brand around it before your 25th birthday.

Look at LinkedIn. People announce promotions with the emotional intensity of someone announcing the discovery of fire. Every internship is a transformative journey. Every meeting is an opportunity to learn. Every minor inconvenience becomes a lesson in leadership.

Meanwhile, I once spent 40 minutes looking for my phone while holding it. And you know what? I would argue that my experience taught me just as much about resilience, self-awareness and problem-solving as any corporate team-building exercise. At least I did not have to make a PowerPoint presentation about it.

Failure is a lifestyle choice 

Let me clarify something before the motivational speakers come looking for me. I am not suggesting that you abandon your responsibilities, refuse to pay your bills or deliberately sabotage every good thing that happens to you. There is a difference between embracing failure and ruining your life.

I am suggesting that perhaps we have become a little too obsessed with winning.

We have turned hobbies into side hustles, friendships into networking opportunities and rest into something that must be justified by how productive we were beforehand. Even our holidays must be meaningful. God forbid we spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing without calling it a digital detox.

You could be perfectly content with your life and still leave a family wedding feeling like you have personally disappointed the nation.

I say we stop participating.

Let your cousin have a government job, let your neighbour’s son enjoy his foreign degree, congratulate them sincerely, eat the biryani at a wedding and return home without conducting a forensic investigation into why your life looks different.

Their success is not your failure and their timeline is not your deadline.

And if you try something and discover that you are terrible at it, congratulations. You have acquired information. You are now free to try something else, or never do that particular thing again. The world will survive without it.

An invitation to disappoint yourself
For International Day of Failure, I propose a modest challenge: fail at something.

Write the terrible first draft, apply for the job you think is beyond you, learn the guitar and sound like a mosquito having an existential crisis, try cooking something without worrying how your family is going to react.

Or do something considerably more radical: take a break without feeling guilty about it.

Not every year needs to be your year and not every decision needs to lead somewhere. Sometimes you will spend months working towards something and discover that you do not even want it anymore.

That is allowed.

We are human beings, not software applications awaiting the next performance update.

I have no inspirational five-step plan to offer you. I have no morning routine that will change your life, no secret formula for success and certainly no podcast to sell you. I am a failure, remember? I have a reputation to maintain.

But I do have one request.

Stop treating yourself like a disappointing investment.

You are allowed to be ambitious without being obsessed, hardworking without being miserable and unsuccessful without considering yourself worthless. You can want more from life while appreciating what you already have. You can fail at something without turning it into a personality disorder.

So here is to the unfinished projects, the abandoned dreams, the awkward career changes, the rejected applications and the people who are still figuring things out while everyone else seems to have received an instruction manual.

We may not have much to show for ourselves yet. We may never become the people we imagined at 17. We may spend our lives being thoroughly average at things that do not matter to anyone outside our little corner of the world.

And that is fine.

The world has enough success stories. It has enough people telling us to wake up earlier, work harder, dream bigger and squeeze every last drop of productivity out of our increasingly exhausted bodies.

Today, I invite you to do the opposite.

Fail spectacularly, recover slowly, achieve absolutely nothing of commercial value, have a lovely lovely afternoon.