The secret of success is a magic potion called "failure"
Hear ye hear ye. All fans of Harry Potter. When the real headmistress of Hodwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry speaks, all of you do well to listen. Of course, we are not referring to Albus Dumbledore, the fictional head of the school, but the maestro behind the masterpiece. Joanne Rowling or J.k Rowling as she is better known. Life was not always a bed of roses for Ms Rowling.
Before she was successful she hit "rock bottom" -as she experienced the death of her mother, divorce and poverty some years after her graduation. But unknown to many, it was such "failure" that made her the billionaire that she is today.
In her own words, this is an excerpt from her commencement address, aptly called "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the importance of imagination", which she delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association in 2008.
The importance of experiencing failure
"What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak.
Ultimately, we have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it is fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere 7 years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.
An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless, The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution, I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant s 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 been realized 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.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attain by passing examination. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected. I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.
The power imagination
"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greeks author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch either people's lives simply by existing.
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already, we have the power to imagine better"
