I Will Help You Fail

The awkwardly tall figure of Frewyn Parks cranes into a glass-walled meeting room and seems to taste the air. His head hovers like a bird trying to sense danger, then withdraws.

“I think this one is already booked.”

I notice there are people sitting in the meeting room, eyes wide with alarm at the intruder.

“That’s all of them booked up.”

“We can sit here,” I suggest, pointing firmly at a break-out area with comfortable modern armchairs. Parks huffs and pulls his jacket back where it had slipped off his shoulders. He is stressed and late.

“Ok. I meant to print the info sheet out for you as well,” he exclaims, angry.

“There’s still time.”

Later, after we have been sitting in the chairs in silence for an impossibly long time, I am sure I catch him sobbing.

“It’s meant to be a workshop atmosphere. It’s meant to be a managed environment in which to feel positive about failure.”

He seems to be vibrating with irate energy as he uses both hands to indicate the bland office infrastructure surrounding us. I wonder why he cannot appreciate the irony of his bemoaning his failure of producing a supportive environment for admitting failure.

Frewyn Parks will not admit to being a failure, even though he has consistently failed throughout his life. His philosophy, expounding in his books and coaching sessions, teaches that success and failure must be defined in one’s own framework, rather than imposed upon us, and therefore we have the power to overcome failure by failing.

“I can’t believe I’ve messed this up. Sorry for wasting your time.”

“Not at all. It is necessarily apt.”

“I would have drawn it on the whiteboard. There aren’t any pens. But. By failing, I am rejecting the hegemony of society’s definition of success. I can fail in society’s eyes but succeed on my own terms if my own definition of success differs from society’s.”

“Which it often does.”

“It often does.” He laughs and stands again, and pulls his jacket back where it has slipped. He paces around the break out area with agitated gestures. He stares with disquiet at those successfully meeting behind the glass.

He has rejected society’s definition of success all his life. The only child of Viscount Avonwick, his childhood was troubled by frequent changes of stately home, as the family sold off its assets and repeatedly downsized. The Viscount was a great provider for the poor during the various recessions and winters of discontent of the 1970’s, and was unable to prevent himself from giving away his belongings to this end. The non-material rewards of this high moral crusade had the unfortunate consequence of the Viscount being unable to meet the school fees at the family’s usual Wellington College. Life for an aristocrat’s son was difficult in the comprehensive system, especially when his father finally renounced his peerage and went to live in an experimental living space with two “wives”.

One can speculate about the lost little boy, obviously still present as he rocks in a bright red bean bag and seems to be biting at something.

“Obviously, there won’t be a presentation, but I can grant you an interview.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ve read some of your profiles. You can be rather harsh.”

“I think I’m fair.”

“Hmm.” He struggles out of the bean bag and repeats the habitual straightening of his slanted jacket. I realise when he looks down that he has been crying.

At state school, he had been introduced to failure by a couple of classmates, with whom he had built up an almost successful business distributing drugs and pornography until the scale of the operation was exposed. Teachers were implicated. The school secretary was arrested. Exclusion was inevitable when Parks claimed he thought the law was only for commoners, and his pedigree meant he could operate in a more liberal legal framework.

There is a chorus of modest laughter from one of the meeting rooms. Parks looks through the glass wall longingly. The polite accord given to a thoroughly rehearsed and neatly prepared presentation.

“I wanted you to understand.”

Parks was fortunate to have inherited connections after his exclusion from the suburban comprehensive. One of his father’s friends dabbled with home-schooling him, but after claims the boy was trapped in a neo-Nazi cult, he was forced to get the young aristocrat back on track. He spent the last few years of formal schooling at Wellington College, where he is still remembered as the most abysmal cricket captain the school as ever seen. Utter academic failure led naturally to Cambridge, then to a political career and a welcome to the boards of a number of companies. Several businesses went to the wall immediately.

In 1992 he was returned as the Conservative MP for Malworth South. He was elected perhaps down to the efforts of his campaign manager, as his own contribution to the campaign ended up as racist, sexist faux pas. It seemed he could articulate no idea or even a single sentence without either being offensive or revealing his own profound ignorance on pretty much all issues. He was wholeheartedly unsuited to politics. Anyone else could have done a better job. Anyone. Despite some of his recorded comments on the campaign trail - “These really are the most gormless, stupid, bovine, idiotic, ugly nincompoops and piccaninnies I have ever had the misfortunate to speak to” - he retained his seat in the 1997 Labour landslide.

“Failure is the only way to learn. That is the essence of what I am trying to communicate.”

Parks’ own celebrated career of notable failures really took off when he entered Parliament. To begin with, he was involved in a minor capacity in the ongoing catastrophes of John Major’s government. Letting David Mellor use his Wandsworth flat, helping Michael Mates choose a watch, and readily taking cash for questions were modest failures, and he was not rebuked for his involvement. But his general incompetence and lack of talent led eventually, through various resignations, to a ministerial role. It was then that his ambitions soared. Buoyed on by low self-awareness and the nearness of any corrupt businessman with a handful of cash, he was able to proclaim such initiatives as the Thames Runway, the tragic Aberdeen Airship and the catastrophic Millennium Meat Raffle. His nickname Penny Parks originated in the estimation that while in office, such was the amount of public money he squandered, that he was personally responsible for adding 1p to income tax.

Of course, flagrantly defrauding the public is not really defined as failure among the British ruling classes, so there was little consequence from the succession of scandals on his political trajectory. But when the details of a modest sexual predilection were revealed in a tabloid sting, there was uproar and calls for resignation. It turned out he had once asked a woman who it is claimed had once been a sex worker to rub yoghurt into his badly sunburned back while on a visit to the south of France. The furore ran for weeks. It wouldn’t go away. In the end, Parks was forced to resign from the government. The revolving door he exited through landed him in the TV studios for the daytime show Get Fit, Fatty! which body-shamed obese working class people in front of a baying live audience. He sat on the judges panel and used his yoghurt-based notoriety to criticise the inadequate lifestyle choices of the contestants. He had to leave the show after he was injured during a physical challenge, shortly before the show was cancelled after the death of a contestant.

A period of convalescence allowed him to reinvent himself as a self-help guru. The period of reflection and self-analysis revealed what he was best at: taking opportunities that his privilege entitles him to, and then squandering or deliberately misusing them. Everything he had tried seemed to be destined to fail. How else to post-rationalise this than to believe there is a message for everyone in repeatedly throwing away chances that others could grasp and turn into something wonderful, something inspiring or of benefit to all. He would help people by helping them to fail.

“The only way to learn what?”

“Anything. Failure is like the friction on the road to success. Effortless success is surely meaningless.”

“These are great self-help soundbites.”

“Thanks.”

“So people could equally fail without your assistance if they just try to succeed?”

“Not in the same way.”

“It would be cheaper?”

“That’s unfair.”

“By understanding failure better, the effort itself becomes more valuable. Some people are motivated only by the success itself, so the process and the experience of trying to succeed passes them by. You want to make people value the learning process itself, the actual effort itself, the friction of trying, as an enrichment of life, rather than simply a means to success. You want people to see that success itself is usually defined by others and can actually be detrimental and misleading for people, whereas the process of trying can be the most rewarding part of the process. Failure to embrace failure is to fail to fully embrace the human condition. Keep trying. Like evolution itself, trial and error, it is a heuristic approach.”

“Yes. Yes. You have put it rather better than I have.”

“It’s just what I consider common sense.”

“You’ve been to one of my seminars before.”

“There was nothing to learn from that experience. At least you were able to successfully book a venue that time.”

Parks has mentored some famous failures. He helped British newscaster Ben Myers go from stable daytime anchor to an incandescently angry political pundit and eventually a UKIP candidate. The billionaire businesswoman and angel investor Urška Tertius was inexplicably taken in by Parks’ self-help scheme, and before long wanted to start building her fortune all over again, giving billions away until she had nothing, playing havoc with stock markets, pension funds and foreign exchanges on the way. After a spell in a psychiatric ward, she is now an economics correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

“Let’s be honest, success is mostly down to luck. In all fields. This perseverance myth is part of the whole Protestant work ethic, isn’t it? We’re all grinding away at these stupid goals, trying to be more productive or gain the respect of peers or make a packet. Whether you succeed is down to getting a lucky break. A serendipitous moment, a chance connection, a good deed returned at just the right moment. This is how the world is built. Not effort.”

“You’re lucid.”

“There is something ticking over up here,” tapping his forehead. “Despite my best efforts.”

“So you understand that it’s not a level playing field?”

“Explain.”

“There is a social element to failure. Your class, the privilege classes, are allowed to fail more, even though the impacts of their failures - people’s savings and public money squandered, are not punished or frowned upon as much as the failures of the underclass or the poor, who seem to be unnecessarily punished. And the poor do not have the same number of opportunities to fail at. To them, success is more valuable as it is a way out of the squalor - it is more desperate success. Check your privilege.”

“Am I alone in believing we live in a meritocratic society?”

“Wow. Check your privilege.”

“I don’t even know what you are saying.”

“Exactly. The playing field is not level - the myth of making it through your own skills and determination does not truly illuminate the volume of luck and skewed opportunity. Invisible to you.”

Parks pushes up from a bean bag and straightens his jacket. There is laughter again in one of the glass-walled meeting rooms. Neat attendees politely applaud. Parks wanders absently nearer and watches with ingenuous envy.

“When you have thoroughly failed, you realise how empty success is. It does not bring the same rewards as failure.” Perhaps he is talking to himself. “The constant failure, the continuous learning and re-appraisal, that frictive affirmation of live leads to that deeper engagement with the meaning of failure. Success simply leads to satisfaction, apathy and emptiness. I know which I prefer.”

“No one could accuse you of being successful.”

“I find your manner to be unnecessarily combative.”

“It’s an interview technique. It’s not personal.”

“I thought I would be able to put my case more clearly.”

“You seem quite confused. As if you haven’t really thought things through.”

“The problems with the room have confused everything. I wanted more of a workshop atmosphere.”

Parks’ workshops are where he showcases his talent for failure. I visited one of them earlier in the year, joining a small group of quiet people who seemed to need reassurance that their lives were not completely wasted. Selwyn, a restaurant critic from Hertfordshire admitted it was depression that had led him to taking the workshop. Maurice, an estate agent, explained how he had repeatedly failed to find any source of meaning his life and believed it was affecting his sales performance. Agatha was a professional psychologist, and confessed that she believed that not just her entire career but the entire academic discipline she operated within to be an utter failure. Everyone listened rapt as Parks rambled through his customary explanations and strategies, aided by bland quotes from a variety of self-help gurus, and graphs showing the power curve that denies most people their ambitions and intensely rewards the very few. The group appeared to be a collection of well-heeled misfits, sharing a background of privilege just like Parks. Most of the time they sat staring at the floor or were somehow too afraid to speak. Eventually, their stories laboured on how they had not fulfilled the expectations others had of them, and how they lived their lives in fear of the judgement of peers and parents. They were a pitiful bunch, a little pocket of the fortunate who had somehow expected more from life.

“How do you feel you have failed, Jantine?”

“Until I joined you here, I didn’t think I had.”

“You can be honest with us. We have been honest with you.”

“Honesty is my trade. That’s why I’m investigating rogues like you.”

“That’s unfair.”

“You provide a sanitary product for the soul. These people have plodded through their lives without imagination or interest. Now the meaninglessness washes over them and they panic that they’ve failed at life. First world problems.”

“You know, I think your aggressive attitude stops you from forming normal human relationships.”

The group had suddenly looked up from their shoes. There was expectation where before there had been only apathy and an appetite for contrition.

“That’s unfair.”

“Why don’t you want us to talk and understand? You need to admit things to yourself first, like in all workshops.”

“I have nothing to admit.”

“We can all see you are failing. Your failure is that you cannot admit why you are here. You cannot allow yourself to be vulnerable. We can see that.”

The sensation of nakedness was difficult to endure. They stared at me for some time, until I was able to control my outbursts and quell my tears. It was true that I had not admitted to myself the real reason I was there. I hid behind a belief in having a professional reason to feel superior to these people. Agatha stood and put her arm around me. I really cried.

I stand to be level with Parks, pushing back the break out bean bag and collecting my notes.

“I think they have nearly finished.” Parks is monitoring activity in one of the meeting rooms.

Since my breakdown at the workshop, I have been helping Parks promote his new self-help book and podcast. The title “I WILL HELP YOU FAIL” is meant as an assault on our success and productivity obsessed society. It contains case studies, such as my own, and exercises that can help to recognise the rewards of failure.

“Come on, let’s go. I don’t think we’ve got time anyway.”