How to Get Things Badly Wrong: Careering Off Course

Most successful entrepreneurs write books about how they achieved success. I may have achieved a few things, but success and I never seemed to be on the same page.My career wasn't ruined by one disastrous decision. That would have been far too efficient.

Instead, it unravelled gradually - through a series of jobs, schemes, excuses and increasingly creative wrong turns.

As a teenager, I had big ambitions and no real plan. Later, I became a trainee manager, mistaking a job title for evidence of a glittering future. I left keys in running cars, locked myself in toilets, failed to prepare for important opportunities and pursued business ideas that ranged from wildly optimistic to financially painful.

I even lost £6,000. Twice.

Careering Off Course is the first book in the How to Get Things Badly Wrong series - a humorous and brutally honest look at careers, work, ambition, entrepreneurship and the quiet ways professional lives drift off course.

Inside, you'll find:

• Career decisions that seemed sensible at the time
• Workplace politics, office absurdities and management myths
• Entrepreneurial schemes that should probably have remained ideas
• Costly mistakes and lessons learned too late
• Stories of failure, luck, stubbornness and occasional achievement
• An honest look at how ambition slowly becomes compromise

This is not a self-help book.

It's a self-criticism book.

Andy Laker does not present himself as an expert, guru or inspirational success story. Instead, he examines the habits, fears, poor decisions and convenient excuses that shaped his working life - often with the benefit of hindsight and a worrying shortage of common sense.

If you have ever taken a job because it seemed sensible, stayed somewhere longer than you should have, followed a path without really knowing why, or wondered how everyone else appeared to have their career figured out, you may recognise more of yourself in these pages than you would like.

Funny, self-deprecating and occasionally uncomfortable, Careering Off Course explores the gap between achievement and success - and what happens when activity is mistaken for progress.

Because most careers don't collapse dramatically.

They simply drift.

And sometimes the best lessons come from getting things badly wrong.