So far, I haven’t had truly bad months in my life. Occasionally, a bad day happens, rarely a week, but I’ve never felt miserable for weeks on end.

(Is jinxing a thing? We’ll found out 🙃)

Apart from (probably) fortuitous genes, unhappiness intolerance is the major reason why. But there’s another strategy that keeps me sane.

I let myself fail gracefully.

Body

Don’t have the will to go for a run? Rather than lying on the sofa surrounded by pillows, Pringles, and self-contempt (been there, done that), I go for a walk:

A walk requires much less energy, relieves guilt, and serves a similar purpose.

Here’s another example. From time to time, I find myself too hungry, busy, and tired to fetch (let alone cook) a healthy meal. Previously, I would eat trash like a desperate racoon. Now I have a strategic stash of 3-minute ravioli in my fridge:

Not as good as a grilled salmon with veggies, but not as bad as two protein bars and a banana.

The goal is to prepare a fallback plan for when I’m weak and break the vicious cycle:

lacking energy
  ↓
taking less care of my body
  ↓ 
feeling guilt and self-contempt
  ↓
having even less energy
  ↓
taking even less care of my body
  ↓
slipping into self-loathing
  ↓
having no energy whatsoever
  ↓
...
  ↓
hello darkness, my old friend

Mind

The same applies to the mind.

No focus for deep work? It’s fine, I keep an augean to-do list with non-demanding tasks to sort out when my cognitive energy is low.

No will for any kind work? Alright, then let’s take a day off and at least eat healthy, spend time with humans, move, and go to bed before 11 pm.

Failing gracefully is a bit less radical than writing off, but the two work well together. That’s my Legolas and Gimli of coping 😅.

Me again

In December, me and Michael co-authored Fibery’s strategy for 2026 (and maybe beyond). Here are all the 17 pages of it with only customer names and revenue numbers redacted:

Fibery strategy 2026 (with blobs)

Yes, everyone (including our competitors) can read it. This is either next-level transparency or utmost stupidity (or both).

If you know another company that does this, let me know – we should probably be B2B friends.

Favorites

• (🎬 14 min) Where do all these crazy collective nouns in English come from? A murder of crows? A school of fish? WTF? If, like me, you’ve always wondered, Rob has done some research.

• (🕹️ 3 min) Chartle – another tiny game where you have to guess a country from a line on a chart. For example, today it took me two guesses to identify Saudi Arabia on a chart showing yearly oil production.

This was issue #13, find more at antoniokov.com.

How do you fail gracefully? Reply to this email and share your perspective.