Whether it’s mind or body, relationship or profession: The business with self-optimization is booming. There is no topic on which there isn’t a manual showing you how to reach you maximum potential. You can despair over it—or you can let yourself be liberated from the obsession with optimization with a lot of humor by Sebastian Rabsahl, one of Germany’s most famous spoken word poets. Refusing performance made simple!

»Higher, faster, farther! You can achieve anything as long as you want it!« We find ourselves standing in front of shelves overflowing with self-help books, clueless about how we can reach those goals. But Sebastian Rabsahl can’t be bothered with putting on a fitness bracelet, optimizing his ability to make small talk, and getting the most out of his apartment. He proposes an offensive approach to the problem: Let’s resist the shrill siren call of self-optimization and let’s lead a life that’s as bad as it can be!

37 chapters train our ability to not handle everything: We learn to cook badly, live badly, exercise badly, even to think badly. So that one day, we, too, can say: Finally a failure!