The numerous things I have failed at

And why I learned to stop making such a big deal out of it

I have been a freelancer for the best part of my 25 year career. Throughout that time I’ve been lucky enough to have been offered a diverse range of professional opportunities - most of which I have accepted instantly in the spirit of ‘fuck it, I’ll give it a go.’ Some of them I have enjoyed, some of them not so much - but I have always come away having learnt something useful. There is something to be said for having a go at everything. But there are also drawbacks - the more stuff you try, the more exposed you are to failure. I have failed at stuff many times.

When I was 16 I walked into the coolest clothes shop in my local high street (not saying much, admittedly) and asked for a Saturday job which they gave me on the spot. I went round bragging to all of my mates about how I had begun a career in the fashion industry. But on my first day in the shop I made a grand total of zero sales then, while cleaning up at the end of the day, managed to bust open the vacuum cleaner and release a large cloud of black dust all over the expensive clobber. I was immediately relieved of my duties.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with magazines.

Being a magazine writer was all I dreamt of doing when I grew up and, shortly after leaving university, I became one. By the times I was in my mid-twenties I was deputy editor of a glossy monthly called Later. I got to interview superstars and personal heroes from the worlds of music, sport and movies. I had a brilliant boss and the rest of the team became good mates. We had so much fun. It was incredible. But when a mad Irish millionaire rocked up in London with dreams of launching a brand new magazine and offered me the editor’s job, I said yes without a moments hesitation. That was how I was when I was younger: if the offer was there and the money was right I would jump on it without thinking twice.

But this madman’s idea for a new magazine was not a good one. For a start, it wasn’t really a magazine at all. It was a CD Rom that would be sold on the newsstand in WH Smiths mounted on a magazine-shaped cardboard facade. The CD Rom, once you loaded it up onto your PC, gave access various live action interviews, games and videos. What a fucking stupid idea. I mean, in my defence, it was the year 2000. But, to be honest, even back then CD Rom’s were a pretty dated technology.

I guess I had thought too much about being an editor on a big salary and not enough about what I actually wanted to do with my life. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the ‘mag’ lasted two issues before the company collapsed and I was left jobless and skint. In the meantime, I had at least managed to hire three of my best mates as staff (yeah, they were well grateful when the whole went immediately tits up) and wasted loads of the Irish millionaire’s money on plush west-end offices and a massive Shoreditch launch party for which I hired a breakdance crew from Birmingham and flew in a Swedish funk band. I also commissioned a six foot by six foot ice sculpture of the brand logo that cost a grand and turned into a puddle before the party was over.

So I can’t say I was completely blameless in the premature collapse of the CD Rom venture. But even if I had been completely studious in my approach to the job it was always destined to fail. Nobody wanted or needed a CD Rom magazine. Not then, not now, not ever. Nevertheless, as I sat alone in my flat in the lonely weeks and months that followed the company’s implosion I found myself confronting feelings of professional failure for the first - but certainly not the last - time

When shit goes bad in your life it can be helpful to examine your own role in the situation.

It helps you grow, improves the quality of your future decisions and, above all, stops you becoming the sort of prick who blames everyone other than himself. Honest self-reflection is important. But there is a big difference between self-reflection and self-flagellation. Branding yourself a failure is an easy but stupid thing to do. Failure is a big word. It sounds definitive and final. Like you’ve had a fair crack at something and been found, categorically and empirically, to be absolutely shit at it.

When you start thinking of yourself as a failure you go to a really dark place. You stop thinking of your problems as temporary challenges or natural bumps in the road and start seeing them as evidence of fundamental flaws in your character. Once those thoughts set in, you can expose yourself to really destructive feelings of self-doubt. In my experience those feelings mutate into depression quite easily. You can freeze completely, unable to muster the confidence or belief to get back out there and try to pursue even the smallest ambition ever again. In that state of mind you can make really bad decisions.

Just after my wife and I had our first child, I landed a job as the presenter of a TV documentary series about foreign criminal gangs operating in the UK. It was well paid and exciting. I had to interview south London Yardies, Turkish ex-heroin barons and undercover cops. On one particularly memorable day’s filing I got to accompany the Berkshire police force on a drug raid of a skunk farm in Reading. Yes, friends, I was living the dream.

But after a few week’s filming it became clear I wasn’t cut out for the role. I was supposed to be a hard-nose reporter, taking foreign criminals to task over the way they had ‘infected’ British society with their vile activities. But, truthfully, I was often wide eyed and excited by my encounters with gangsters. And, sometimes, I was even sympathetic with them. When the police nicked the young Chinese lad who had been overseeing the skunk farm in Reading he started to cry. The director told me to go and question him on his criminal activities but I ended up hugging him and telling him it would all be okay. The next day, my agent called and told me I was being replaced by a different presenter. The production company thought I didn’t haver the right journalistic approach.

On reflection, they were right to sack me.

But at the time all I could do was sink into a swamp of misery. I was stung by the rejection and branded myself a failure. Not just a professional failure but worse - a failure as a father. The job had been a kushy one in most respects. Filming interviews with cops and robbers is fun and thrilling and the producers usually got me a taxi to and from the location. And yet I had fucked it up. I thought about all the other dads out there with proper jobs that required serious toil and long hours of boredom who just kept their heads down and got the work done because they had to provide for their families. I compared myself to those sorts of blokes and felt like a piece of shit. I let that thought really take hold and drag me down for a long period of time, during which I was unable to get back up, brush myself down and look forward to the next opportunity. My confidence fell out of my arse, I became utterly despondent and started looking for bar-work.

By this stage in my life I had already been a journalist for over ten years and had some success behind me. I was miles off the point at which I should have been contemplating a complete career change. I had just hit a temporary setback. But the voice in my head whispering ‘failure’ was relentless and kept getting louder. Luckily , I had a wife who helped to slowly rebuild my paper-thin self-esteem and convince me it wasn’t time just yet to start knocking out pints of Guinness down The Red Lion (not that there’s anything wrong with that line of work - it just wasn’t part of my career trajectory at the time).

I always had a tendency to be a bit fragile.

As with the CD Rom debacle, I had the capacity to overreact and beat myself up when I let good opportunities turn bad. But becoming a dad really exaggerated that tendency. TV and films tell us that good dads are responsible, hard working and selfless. They are solid and consistent. They put their family before themselves in everything they do. So when we don’t conform to that pretty narrow definition of successful fathering, we can be quick to start hating on ourselves. Then there is the slightly old fashioned and sexist notion that fathers are supposed to ‘provide’ for their families. Despite my liberal, feminist posturing, I was as in thrall to this idea as the next idiot. I thought I had to not just provide food and shelter for my child. I thought I had to give her a special childhood - or at least one more special than my own.

My dad had left us when I was still a toddler and started a new career and family in a posher part of town. I was raised by a single mum, the youngest of four sons, in a small council house. My mum got next to nothing from my dad and we survived to a large extent on family allowance and credit. It wasn’t quite the stuff of Dickensian poverty but neither was it that comfortable. I was fixated on giving my daughter (and the son who came along a few years later) so much more: holidays, take-aways, trips to Hamleys and fucking loads and loads of bikes and Star Wars figures.

I set the bar unrealistically high and whenever I (inevitably) fell short I would demolish myself mentally and emotionally. I could no longer lose a bit of freelance work and just crack on. For the first few years of fatherhood even the expiry of a not particularly lucrative contract would sometimes send me spinning into long, tedious and exhausting periods of self-loathing and existential despair.

Fourteen years into fatherhood, I think I’ve got over all that now - more or less.

I will still judge myself harshly from time to time. If I fuck something up I will still occasionally catch myself mouthing the word ‘cunt’ at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror. But I am now able to shut those kind of negative thoughts down quicker. I spot them early, know exactly where they might lead and make a very conscious decision to close them down before they take hold.

Sometimes I avoid negative thoughts by trying to distract my brain with other stuff - like happy memories or positive affirmations or Fifa managerial career mode.

But, much more importantly than that, I judge myself on simpler terms these days. I try to focus on one clear version of myself and try to be the best at being that. Basically, I want to be a decent husband and father who is reliable and loving - and happy. Being happy in myself is important to being a decent father and husband. Those dads who keep their heads down and mouths shut and get on with their daily toil without any time for themselves usually end up being grumpy and miserable. Or having premature heart attacks. I look after my own happiness in pretty simple ways these days: tea; cats; football; music. And if none of that works I can always smash the emergency glass and call upon the old failsafe: a wank and a Snickers.

When I was younger I was often trying to be a million different people all at once.

And all my different personas would end up getting in the way of each other. That meant I was often miserable. Nowadays, I know who I am. I don’t set my standards that high if I’m honest. I don’t think i need to be wildly rich or consistently ecstatic. I don’t think I need to lavish my kids with treats and bikes and holidays to make me a good dad (in fact I realise the reverse is probably true). When stuff to do with work sometimes goes iffy or I’m skint at the end of the month I still feel a bit worried or gutted. But I don’t start thinking of myself as a failure. I’ve got those daft thoughts on lockdown. I just think I’m a normal bloke having all the same ups and downs as everyone else. I realise that bad moments always pass and rarely, if ever, get remotely close to the mad catastrophes you conjure in your mind when you lie awake at night.

You could say I have successfully lowered my expectations of myself. Really, I have just come to recognise that the expectations should have been lower all along.

This week’s podcast - with Paul Danan

On The Reset podcast this week I spoke with Paul Danan. Paul is an actor and a tabloid character who has lived the madcap celebrity lifestyle to the full. But he is also smarter and more sensitive than you might realise. He has battled drugs and depression for many years and been through rehab over twenty times. He is sober now and is full of great stories and genuine wisdom on mental health, addiction and recovery. Please give it a listen, some people have been in touch saying this is their favourite episode so far.

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@ChairtySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/