Is this the same as the United Nations day on October 13?

No. The UN observance on that date is the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, designated in 1989. The failure day is a separate Finnish-founded campaign that happens to share the date.

Who runs the International Day for Failure now?

No organisation appears to run it as an active campaign any more. Aaltoes, the student society that founded it, is still operating at Aalto University.

Why is it held on October 13?

The date has been fixed since the first Finnish observance in 2010 and has never moved. No source records why the organisers chose that particular day, so the reason is undocumented.

International Day for Failure

Next celebratedTuesday, October 13, 2026

Failure gets discussed openly on this day, fittingly so: the campaign to make it as recognized as Valentine's Day by 2020 fell short, and its manifesto survives only in the Internet Archive.

See how to celebrate

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Last updated September 3, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEOctober 13

OBSERVED INInternationally

CATEGORYHealth

SUBCATEGORYSelf-Improvement

ORIGIN

Institutional Initiative

FOUNDING ENTITY

Aalto Entrepreneurship Society (AaltoES)

FIRST OBSERVED

2010

“AaltoES started the day in 2010 as a Finnish national campaign, then renamed it the International Day for Failure in 2012.

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A student society's answer to a national taboo.

The Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, a student-run body at Aalto University in Helsinki, started the day in 2010 as a Finnish national campaign to change how the country treated failure. In 2012 AaltoES and the corporate governance network Boardman rescoped the campaign and renamed it the International Day for Failure.

Read the campaign's 2012 press kitvia Aalto Entrepreneurship Society

INTRO

Why October 13 was supposed to rival Valentine's Day

The International Day for Failure came with a deadline attached. Its organisers wrote that the goal was to make October 13 an internationally recognized holiday, on the model of the day people exchange valentines. They gave themselves until 2020.

2020 came and went. Marking the day in Seura in 2025, the Finnish columnist Koikkalainen judged that the long effort to turn it into a broad Finnish tradition had failed. He was not writing the idea off: failures, he added, need to be given room.

That leaves the day in an unusual position. On the measure closest to its purpose, Finland has moved the wrong way: fear of failure as a barrier to starting a business has risen there since 2015.

ORIGINS

International Day for Failure history

INTRODUCTION

Start in a Finnish classroom. The rapper Henri Vähäkainu, better known as Pikku-G, described one where nobody raises a hand unless they are completely sure of the answer. He called fear of failure a Finnish national disease.

He said it as part of a campaign that was collecting exactly that kind of testimony, name by name. The people running it were students.

CHAPTER 01

The society behind it

Aalto Entrepreneurship Society is a student-run body at Aalto University in Helsinki. Aalto's own site calls it the most active student-led entrepreneurship community in Europe, and credits it with Slush, Junction and Startup Sauna. In 2010 it started something quieter: a national day for talking about what had gone wrong.

CHAPTER 02

An unlikely roster

By the following autumn the campaign had assembled a strange coalition. Jorma Ollila, then chairman of Nokia, contributed a piece headed failure is a learning experience. Jyri Häkämies, Finland's economic affairs minister at the time, wrote that fear of failure must not stop young people from trying.

The ice hockey coach Jukka Jalonen signed up, and so did the philosopher Esa Saarinen. The organisers were working the whole of Finnish public life, not only its startups.

CHAPTER 03

Going global, then going quiet

In 2012 the campaign changed its name. The Finnish site went up under the banner "This year, we go global", and the day became the International Day for Failure. AaltoES ran it with Boardman, a Finnish corporate governance network.

The state picked it up next. In 2017 the Prime Minister's Office's Experimental Finland team held its own event at the Helsinki City Theatre, under the title Herozerohero. Video messages arrived from the Finnish Cultural Institutes in Estonia, Japan and the United Kingdom.

CHAPTER 04

What is left of it

The campaign itself did not last. Both of its websites are gone: the Finnish one no longer resolves, and the English domain now serves an unrelated gambling affiliate page. The manifesto, the press kit and the interviews survive only in the Internet Archive.

TIMELINE

Timeline

A student society starts a day

The Aalto Entrepreneurship Society began a Finnish national campaign on October 13 to change how the country treated failure.

Nokia's chairman signs on

Jorma Ollila contributed to the campaign alongside a serving government minister and a run of other named Finnish public figures.

The day is renamed international

AaltoES and Boardman rescoped the Finnish campaign and gave it an English-language site, manifesto and press kit.

Finland's broadcaster covers the day

Yle reported on the observance and named the producer running that year's edition.

The government hosts its own

The Prime Minister's Office ran a public event called Herozerohero at the Helsinki City Theatre.

The IOC marks the date

Olympics.com built a feature around what elite athletes mean when they credit failure for their success.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why International Day for Failure Matters

EVIDENCE

Finnish women reported the fear. Nordic neighbours showed no such gap.

Finland's 2021 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report found Finnish women reporting significantly more fear of failure about starting a business than Finnish men did. Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands showed no such gap between women and men.

POLICY

A government took the argument into its own work

Ira Alanko, project manager of the Prime Minister's Office's Experimental Finland team, said fear of failure is one of the key factors blocking people from trying out new creative solutions. Alanko added that tolerating failure is an essential skill in all development work.

PRECISION

Its claim was narrower than it sounds

Finnish coverage summarised the day's theme at the time as a reminder that failure is not the bad thing, but that fear of failure is. The target was the fear, not the setback.

It is paradoxical that in countries with a strong safety net, the fear of failure and aversion to risk appear the greatest. How much such attitudes are a drag on entrepreneurship is uncertain, but calling attention to the opportunities of failure, in all walks of life, is a brilliant idea.

Bengt HolmströmProfessor of economics at MIT, writing for the campaign in 2011

Failure and mistakes are not the same thing. Failure just means something turned out wrong and it didn't go as planned, and now you learned from it.

Niklas HambergPresident of Aaltoes, speaking to Euronews in 2023

BY THE NUMBERS

International Day for Failure by the Numbers

1.2M+: Finns reached in 2011, self-reported
15: Public figures interviewed, campaign's count
37%: Finns deterred by fear of failure, 2014
40%: EU average deterred by that fear, 2014

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe International Day for Failure

Read the manifesto its founders wrote

The manifesto is where the organisers made their case in their own words, rather than in anyone else's summary of it. It survives in the Internet Archive after the campaign's own site was lost.

SET

Set it up where you work or study

The campaign built separate participation tracks for schools and for companies rather than one generic set of tips. Its own site carried an events organiser for anyone wanting to run something locally.

POST

Post a failure under the campaign's hashtag

The day's own site asked people to tweet a failure with #dayforfailure or share a failphoto on Instagram. Its promise to anyone hesitating was that you would not be alone.

ASK

Ask about the setbacks behind a success

The campaign built its interviews around that question, including one with an entrepreneur who called his bankruptcy a Harvard MBA level learning experience. Its chair said in 2013 that the interesting part was never the success but the rough growth stories behind it.

COOK

Cook something well and let it burn

The campaign's own list of ways to mark the day included buying good ingredients, preparing everything properly, and then burning the food. That list ran to ten items and ended with the instruction to learn from your failure.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know International Day for Failure?

1 / 9

Which organisation started the Day for Failure?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal or governmental designation found in Finland, so it is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

15sources

9primary records

15independently dated

Primary records

Day for Failure (Aalto Entrepreneurship Society)2012

Press Kit, The International Day for Failure

The organisers' own press kit, with the 2010 founding claim and campaign reach figures