Rowling’s commencement address at Harvard
June 8th, 2008J. K. Rowling was the commencement speaker at Harvard. Her commencement address to the graduating class on the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination is one of the best I have heard (via Atanu Dey). I had tears in my eyes when she was talking about how her initial failure became a foundation for her later successes. While I have heard several people say this about failure, Rowling is a person who has lived it and there is no one better to describe it vividly in words. Here are some excerpts:
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.
Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
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.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. 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.
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
Only qouted selected parts of the speech, which got almost a two-and-half minute standing ovation. Please read the entire speech. And if you are too lazy to read it, go watch it here.