Commencement address by J.K. Rowling

I should save this for next spring or summer, when college commencements are underway. The traditional item to post at that time of year is the "Wear Sunscreen" piece. This one is equally good, and I don't want to wait to post it. It was given by J.K. Rowling at Harvard's commencement this year. An excerpt of her address is HERE. The full text of her prepared comments is HERE, along with a video of the live presentation. What I have copied below is an excerpt of the excerpt to whet your appetite; I encourage you to plunge into the fulltext...

"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.…

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension...T hey had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships...

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure... …[B]y 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….

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 where I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had 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.

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 have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default...

Given a Time-Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two..."

(reminder - fulltext and video HERE. If your time is limited, that link is more uplifting and informative than the rest of my blog...)