"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 …..."
J K Rowling, Harvard Alumni Association, Commencement Address, 2008.
I had stumbled upon the You Tube video of this speech one soporific weekend afternoon but soon I was intrigued and twenty minutes later I was wide awake. Coming from the woman who had created Harry Potter, I thought that the main motif of her speech would be to extol the virtues of the power of imagination but in the end I felt she had said something even more profound which I least expected.
She talked about failure. Yes, early on in her life, by her own admission, she had failed, but paradoxically that failure was more valuable to her than her remarkable success later on in life. I had always heard of the saying ‘Failures are stepping stones to success” but I had accepted it as a truism without being been able to fully relate to it personally. However when she started talking about the effects of failure and what failure does to a person was I finally able understand the true meaning with startling familiarity. And as she said “Ultimately, we all 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”. As a young student I had failed to clear an important examination and I had let the world decide that I had failed. As a consequence I was left wallowing in periods of self-pity, self-doubt and diffidence at a crucial crossroad in life. I did not realize it then but as I reflect on it now, that failure helped steer me in the right direction for I was set free as she points out so eloquently—set free from doing something I really did not want to do and more importantly set free to do what I actually wanted to do.
I won’t try and amplify more on what she said. Just read/watch it and be your own judge.
I saw that video around 2 months. I liked it a lot.
ReplyDeleteBut the point is... what then does it mean to succeed. Can we conclude that if Harry Potter had failed she would have produced a better book or a better 'something'.
What is the purpose of life anyway.
May be the idea is just to motivate people, in this case graduates. And ... it is motivating. JKR scored again.
Good thing that you linked that lecture in your blog. I can find it anytime now.