'Try again. Fail again," wrote Samuel Beckett as counsel to the unsuccessful. "Fail better." But for anyone not driven by a writer's restless urge to continue producing work even when it goes unrecognised, the alternative advantages of simply giving up should not be underrated.

There is a fine line between self-belief and delusion. An equation for calculating where the line falls: if x is the number of rejection letters you have received for your novel/film script/progressive rock opera; and y is the number of years you have lived in the childhood bedroom of your parents' house, and x+y>50, move on.

Too big to fail

The best careers in which to fail are ones that reward incompetence with a lavish payoff. For example, the current market rate for managing a world-class Premier League football team and failing to qualify for the Champions League is around £5m. For breaking a bank, you should expect something in the order of £10m-£20m. This should include a pension plated in solid gold.

Global finance is a particularly good area to fail in because the more vital your institution is to the national economy, the more money you get when it goes wrong. The first rule of receiving a massive taxpayer-funded reward for failure is to show absolutely no contrition. In the event that you are then vilified in public, wallow in martyred self-pity.

Public service failure

Another good way to grow too big to fail is to run a company specialising in winning outsourced contracts for essential public services. That way, the government has to support you regardless of whether the services you provide are rubbish. Failure in the public sector should be blamed on Tory cuts if you are a public sector employee and public sector employees if you are a Tory.

Schools are said to be failing when teachers do not spend enough time preparing for Ofsted inspections. Ofsted inspectors cannot fail. Failing schools are then put in "special measures", which means they can become academies. This automatically makes them successful again.

Failure in politics

Enoch Powell once said: "Political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure."

He also advised public speaking with a full bladder and warned that immigration could change the colour of major waterways, so his wisdom is open to question. Nonetheless, the rule is a sound one. It can be amended with the note that many political lives also begin with failure and have failure liberally dotted through their middles, too.

When MPs fail, it is customary for them to receive seats in the House of Lords. The correct title for ministers and shadow ministers who fail to become leaders of their parties is "one of the best prime ministers we never had".

Ministers who oversee failing policies should blame, in this order, the legacy of the last government, civil servants, negative media coverage.

Having shifted the blame, it is traditional to declare that lessons must be learned from failure.

To establish what these lessons should be, set up a commission of inquiry. Only do this if the inquiry is likely to conclude that the lessons should be learned by someone else.

In the event of a chancellor presiding over an economic policy that has failed, one option is to pretend that it has succeeded. This is called "sticking to the long-term plan".

Thus, for example, if every one of your growth forecasts and targets for deficit reduction have been missed, simply ignore the fact and state that your plan has worked. (Note: this technique works best with craven newspaper support and pathetic opposition.)

Failed state

A country run by a dysfunctional regime that doesn't buy arms from the UK or US.

Heroic failure

What Britain uses to bolster its national self-esteem in the absence of sporting triumph. Not to be confused with #epicfail, which is applied only to people humiliating themselves on the internet.

Rafael Behr