More Heroic Failures

Before you read: 
1
 
Look at the words below. Put them into groups of four 
words about: LOVE, WORK, SPORT, WAR. 
football factory 
girlfriend enemy
husband gun 
soldiers game 
fight marry 
fishing job 
office players 
boss kiss 
2 Which words can have the same meaning? unhelpful
supermarket pleased thief 
3 Which words have the opposite meaning? 
happy enemy clever
robber win boring
useless exciting lose
shop stupid friend 
4 The stories in this book are about people who are failures.
Can you think of ways in which these people can 
fail? 
A man who plans to work quietly in his lunch hour. 
Three men who plan to rob a post office. 
Two robbers who try to escape after stealing from a shop. 
A warship that shoots at an enemy ship in the Arctic Sea. 
A student who dances with a girl that he likes. 
A man who tries to kidnap the girl that he loves. 
Now read the stories and see what really happens. 

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A word from Stephen Pile:
For all those writers of terrible books about how to be a 
success,
 
I have written this book about how to be a 
failure.
 
I
 
think it’s perfectly all right to be a failure 
because I am one and all my friends are, too. 
INTRODUCTION 
Success is not really important. 
Everyone loves success. Everyone wants to do things 
well. But we all know that people are really good at 
doing things badly. Failure is the thing that we are best 
at. This is the difference between people and animals and 
we must not think that failure is bad. 
Of course, 
some 
people are successful — clever, 
unusual people like Einstein, Mozart, Steven Spielberg. 
But this book is not for them. It is for us — people who 
are not very good at anything and who make a lot of 
mistakes. 
Here in one book for the first time are the well-known 
names: the terrible Tito, the stupid Mountnessing 
robbers, the unlucky Mr Hird, and many more. They are 
all