Wise Words From J. K. Rowling

Please go read or watch the video of J. K. Rowling's commencement address at Harvard University. It's powerful, simply amazing. After pondering what to speak of, she says:

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

I'll give you a few snippets of the address, but I urge you to read the entire speech or watch the video at the Harvard Magazine website that I link to above. It will take a little time, but I promise you, it's worth it.

She tells of the period in her life, seven years after graduating from the university, when her marriage had ended and she was a jobless single mother. It was a time of great difficulty for her. She says of herself, "I was the biggest failure I knew".

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

On imagination:

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Her final words from Seneca:

"As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."
I wish you all very good lives.

I hope that these brief quotes are enough to whet your appetite for more.

Thanks to Ann for the link.