Imagine you’ve published a string of highly successful books, that have been acclaimed as both profound and accessible. You’ve presented tie-in TV series that did very well in the ratings.

You’ve got a big house in a fashionable part of London. And as if that weren’t enough, before you even started to climb the ladder of success, you had a trust fund of £200m (that’s more than $300m), thanks to your banker father.

You’re happy, right?

Not if you’re philosopher Alain de Botton.

In his presentation to TED Global 2009 in Oxford in June, he confessed that the gap between his hopes for his life and the reality are so divergent, he ends up weeping into his pillow – usually on a Sunday evening, as the sun goes down.

Sound familiar?

De Botton’s talk, A Kindler, Gentler Philosophy of Success, is humourous, entertaining and highly practical. In a world that spins ever faster, with success seemingly forever beyond our grasp, he injects a welcome note of reality into our frenzied lives.

It’s 16 minutes long, and you’ll feel better after watching it. I guarantee it (or your money back).

If you’re reading this in an email message, click here to view the talk.

Find out more:

• Of course there’s a tie-in book: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (for the US edition, click here) by Alain de Botton will help make your job more meaningful. No, really.
• So what do you do? The Brain Surgeon sketch from the BBC series That Mitchell & Webb Look.
• Office affairs: Lynn Barber interviews Alain de Botton at guardian.co.uk.

Related posts:

1. What’s your success-recovery plan?
2. Tell me what to do
3. Dare to fail. It’s the only way to succeed.
4. What sort of mind do you have?

It’s that time of year again: Christmas is a distant memory, you can’t shed those extra pounds and the credit card bills are rolling in.

Luckily, there’s always someone else with bigger problems. And Fortune magazine has assembled the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business to cheer you up.

It’s a romp through the lows (some of them very low indeed) of last year.

In case you haven’t got time to check out all 101, here are my personal favourites:

• (10) Diebold, who put a picture of the key for their electronic voting machines on their website – just enough detail for somebody to cut a real one.
• (15) Bindeez, an Australian toy made from beads. When sucked, the beads released the date-rape drug GHB.
• (16) Microsoft, whose PR agency compiled a 13-page dossier on a journalist – then emailed it to him by mistake.
• (38) The 409 people who clicked on a Google Adwords ad that said ‘Drive-By Download. Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here.’
• (48) The European Union, whose campaign to promote European cinema, Let’s come together, raised (at least) an eyebrow.
• (50) The US Defense Department, and the case of the $969,000 postage stamp.
• (51) Apple, who slipped up on customer service – with a nine-year-old iPod fan.
• (67) McDonald’s, who took on the Oxford English Dictionary over the word ‘McJob’.
• (81) Data-centre operator 365 Main, who set the bar high – then fell at the first hurdle.
• (93) British Airways, who put the body of dead economy passenger in the seat next to a sleeping first-class one  – and told him to ‘get over it’ when he woke up and complained.
• (97) Blogger, whose own company blog was flagged as spam and promptly disabled.

There. You’re feeling better already, aren’t you?

I know I am.

Related posts:

1. What makes you different?
2. Turn away customers and get more business