From BoingBoing, courtesy of Mark Frauenfelder:
J.K. Rowling’s terrific commencement address at Harvard is available as a video, MP3, or text.
The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….
I
think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven
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 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
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 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. ,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained
by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I
could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for
all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any
qualification I ever earned….
