New book asks whether career mistakes can teach us more than success stories

Bath author Andy Laker turns decades of wrong turns, abandoned ambitions and workplace absurdity into an honest and humorous “how-not-to” guide

BATH, UK — August 2026: Bookshops are full of successful people explaining how they reached the top. Andy Laker has written a book about repeatedly heading in the wrong direction.

His new memoir, Careering Off Course, explores what happens when ambition collides with hesitation, misplaced optimism and a dangerous willingness to confuse activity with progress.

Rather than offering a polished formula for professional success, Laker examines the temporary jobs that became permanent, the business ideas that unravelled, the opportunities he failed to prepare for and the supposedly sensible decisions that gradually carried him further away from the career he imagined.

“This isn’t a self-help book,” says Laker. “It’s closer to a self-critique. I’m not claiming to have discovered the formula for success. I’m trying to understand why so many perfectly reasonable decisions eventually took me somewhere I never intended to go.”

Published by HTGTBW Publishing, Careering Off Course is the first title in the How to Get Things Badly Wrong series: a collection of humorous and honest books exploring careers, entrepreneurship, education, parenting, health and everyday life through the experience of getting things wrong first and understanding them later.

The book follows Laker from childhood ambitions and early employment through retail, sales, customer service, IT, call centres, education, property and a succession of entrepreneurial ventures ranging from mildly optimistic to financially painful.

Along the way, he locked himself in a toilet, left his keys inside a running car, mistook the title “Trainee Manager” for evidence of a glittering future, failed to prepare properly for important opportunities and learned several costly business lessons the hard way.

The result is part memoir, part workplace comedy and part investigation into how careers
gradually drift o course.

“Careers don’t always collapse in one dramatic moment,” says Laker. “More often, they
meander. A temporary job becomes permanent, a safe choice becomes a habit and Plan B
quietly replaces the thing you originally wanted to do.”

Rather than removing the embarrassing episodes, poor decisions and unsuccessful ventures, Laker has deliberately placed them at the centre of the book.

“Most success stories look wonderfully logical when written backwards,” he says. “The
hesitation, panic, bad judgement and blind luck tend to get edited out. I’ve kept those bits in. Unfortunately, there were quite a lot of them.”

Although written primarily to entertain, Careering Off Course also explores ambition, confidence, fear of judgement, workplace culture, conformity and the difference between being busy and making genuine progress.

It also questions the familiar idea that every career must follow a deliberate upward path.

“I spent years assuming everyone else had a proper plan,” says Laker. “Eventually, I realised many people are simply making decisions as they go along, then presenting the result afterwards as if it had all been intentional.”

Laker began writing the book after turning 50, despite having strongly disliked reading as a child.

“The boy who used to bounce on his bed to avoid reading has somehow written a book,” he says. “Finishing it may be the most surprising career development of all.”

Laker intends to donate five per cent of his profits from Careering Off Course to Virgin StartUp.

Careering Off Course will be published in paperback September 2026, priced at £9.99, and will also be available as an ebook.