I’ve just started reading a fascinating book called Help!

Subtitled How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done, it’s written by Guardian journalist, Oliver Burkeman, who has a column in the weeekend section called This Column Will Change Your Life.

The subtitle is deliberately downplaying the ability of one small paperback to change everything forever overnight, taking a swipe as it does at self-help literature that offers to do just that.

Burkeman’s book, together with those such as Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds, is one of a growing genre you might call Academic Psychology Lite or Self-Help Heavy if you prefer. It looks at and distils genuine scientific evidence for various techniques to improve our lives, rather than relying on the random thoughts of a shaman an author may have bumped into whilst stumbling through a fog of marijuana smoke at an orgy in Delhi.

So far, Help! has thrown up some good stuff. This one was an eye opener for me:

“Passion is the feeling you get from mastering a skill, not some magical quality unrelated to hard work: you create passion rather than finding it.”

As someone who has wasted rather too many years waiting to ‘find my passion/ niche/ calling/ vocation’, it is enlightening to realise that ‘almost any interest can be transformed into a passion with hard work,’ even if it is a shame about that hard work bit.

Or this on perfectionism, where he quotes the essayist Anne Lamott:

‘Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life…perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.’

Before even buying this book, my thinking was beginning to go along these lines. I turned 40 in January and the overwhelming theme of the past 40 years is one of unfulfilled potential. That I have not done what I might with what I have got. The ‘oppressor’ perfectionism is largely to blame, a fear of failure that has outplayed itself in numerous excuses and the skilful avoidance of responsibility.

And so this next decade is going to be the decade of bluffing and almighty cock ups. Big myself up, try things, say I can do things when I can’t (make sure you are not having a heart attack on my flight when the call goes out for a doctor. I’ll be there at the head of the queue).

This blog is part of that process. It gets me writing. It isn’t perfect. It’s not even very interesting. But so what. It’s out there. It gets me working, improving, moving and growing.

Perhaps I will chronicle some of my failings here over the next few months and years. The building that collapses after I convince a hotel company I am a qualified architect. The West End musical I write – a tribute to Tim Henman and Andy Murray to music inspired by Leonard Cohen – that closes after its opening night. The scrapes I get into when I offer to be the next president of Egypt and they accept.

You know the kind of thing.

Watch this space and, who knows, my 50s could be ‘The Prison Years’.