The Fringe Benefits of Failure
3 min readOct 28, 2020
A Powerful Speech by J.K. Rowling
‘The Fringe Benefits of Failure and The Importance of Imagination’ is the title of J.K. Rowling’s commencement speech at Harvard University in 2008. She delivered her powerful speech in front of Harvard professors and graduates. I cannot remember when was the first time I listened to her speech, because I repeated many times.
There are many lessons that we can learn from J.K. Rowling’s life and carrier. There are many ups and downs she have gone through. So, here are several important points for us to remember and learn from her speech.
- What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
- 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 one arena I believed 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 have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.
- 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. 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. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
- 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.
- Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
- Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount 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.
- 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 change.
- We do not need magic to change our 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.
For the full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UibfDUPJAEU
