My favourite book ever is "The Book of Heroic Failures". It celebrates failure. In the introduction, Stephen Pile wrote: Success is overrated. Everyone craves

My favourite book ever is "The Book of Heroic Failures". It celebrates failure. In the introduction, Stephen Pile wrote: Success is overrated. Everyone craves it despite daily proof that man's real genius lies in quite the opposite direction. Incompetence is what we are good at: it is the quality that marks us off from animals and we should learn to revere it. Of course, the occasional Segovia does slip through the net with the result that we all cut sandwiches and queue in the rain for hours to watch him play the guitar without once dropping his plectrum down the hole. But this book is not for the likes of him. It is for us: we, the less than good, who spend hours shaking the plectrum out and impress only our mothers. Here, collected in one anthology for the first time, are the great names: Coates, Falconer, the abysmal Nuttall, the immortal Carolino, the dire Foster-Jenkins and McGonagall. People who were so bad in their chosen sphere of endeavour that their names live on as a beacon for future generations. I am sure that I am not the only one who cannot do things and the slightest investigation reveals that no one else can do anything either. This being the case, it seems to me that Mankind spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about the things he does well, when these few blades of grass are surrounded by vast prairies of inadequacy which are much more interesting. More and more I find myself agreeing with the author.