Are you fed up with all those guides to having a perfect happy life? All the well-meaning advice on how to be more efficient, faster, more successful, richer, to simply be different and better than you are now? I believe that now and then it’s excellent to read something uplifting, to draw inspiration and courage to better myself. But at other times tips on how to be richer, more beautiful, more popular and more successful lead to nothing but frustration… 

So I’ve decided – I want to encourage you to be average. Don’t be afraid of not being a star! Why should you be the one looking for something more than you actually have? It’s OK as it is.
There are not than many things in life that are really important. To hell with being excellent in all aspects. Don’t aspire towards perfection, don’t insist on trivialities. In the end no one will remember if your child went to bed at eight or half past nine. Nobody will deliberate whether you had a child at the age of thirty-one or thirty-four. No one is going to judge how many noughts you’ve got in your bank account and nobody will be interested in your one-off November depression. Just allow yourself to have it. Or rather – enjoy it! Go and look in the mirror and before you start saying to yourself how awful you look, keep repeating to your reflection in the mirror – what a poor person I am, what a poor person I am, what a poor person I am, until you start laughing.

PS: If that doesn’t work, tune in to the news and be happy that we live in such a prosperous and safe country!