Failures have a bad reputation. They are seen as weakness rather than a gain in experience. Yet, almost no success story is without the inevitable crash, as the life stories of Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, or Charles de Gaulle demonstrate. Charles Pépin reconsiders failure. He understands it, in the spirit of the Stoics, as a privileged encounter with reality, and like the existentialists, as an opportunity for reinvention. In his charming compendium, he outlines a liberating philosophy of failure that brims with optimism and shows what one misses who has never failed. A wonderfully insightful philosophical guide to mastering defeat.