This is not a book for those who want to become rich, famous, or successful, but for those who want to understand why they haven't. You could call it a book written in reverse-one that begins with failures, with the defeats we all encounter along the way. Its aim is to analyze and understand them, to ask why they happened. It's a book designed to highlight the meaning behind every failure and encourage the search for reasons to start again.
You might call it a manual of daily introspection. A kind of detailed map of the abyss we sometimes unknowingly dig beneath our own feet. Within these pages, you'll find 90 rules (though there could easily be more). Rules which, if followed, will guarantee dissatisfaction and a real, existential kind of failure-one that slowly extinguishes you emotionally. If that's what you're looking for.
Not necessarily failure in material or financial terms, but failure that gnaws at the very roots of your inner life. Each rule has its own identity, and repeated over time, they assure regret, mediocrity, and missed opportunities. However, if examined and used as cautionary tales, they can help you avoid falling-and instead, begin or begin again with fresh perspective.
Each of the 90 rules collected here is the result of common habits-so widespread they seem harmless. But added together, day by day, they can destroy even the brightest of talents.
Remember: failure is not usually the result of a single, sudden event. More often, it is the outcome of a long sequence of poor choices, omissions, fears, and patterns of behavior layered over time-many of which gather under the shelter of inertia and fear of failure.
Inaction, hesitation, the choice not to act-often wrapped in self-justifications-are the clearest examples. This book will teach you how to escape clichés, abandon the well-trodden paths, and break free from the rules you've consciously or unconsciously followed. It urges you beyond the imaginary fence you've built around yourself.
Here you'll find every stake that's held your life back. And by removing them, you'll give yourself a real chance to reach the goals you've failed to achieve so far-or at the very least, to begin pursuing them.
This book will guide you-step by step-through the rules that have blocked your path, helping you to overcome them. The journey you're about to embark on is a kind of escape. Not toward a different destination, but away from the version of yourself that was still, restrained by chains-now finally set free after uncovering what you must stop doing and following.
This book is not just for those who have already given up, but also for those who press on without truly moving forward. For those who call themselves cautious but are, in truth, paralyzed. For those who have stopped trying, yet continue pretending they want to change.
If you see yourself in these words, you've picked up the right book. If you don't, try reading it again a few years from now. Maybe you'll laugh. Maybe you'll get angry. Maybe you'll feel exposed. Good. That's when you'll finally start to understand. Because only by recognizing the paths of failure can you truly decide not to walk them again.