alexiss dawn

A link to the commencement speech J.K. Rowling gave today at Harvard was just getting passed around AM. I thought it was worthy to share here. I’m always looking for doses of inspiration, and this is one of those great ones. I’ll keep an eye out for the video of it, but for now, you can read the text of her speech on Harvard’s news site.

So many good tidbits in there, but one I especially liked:

What I feared most for myself at your age was … failure.

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…

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.

EDIT: Just found an audio version of the speech along with text on the Harvard Magazine website. It has a link for the video so that should be coming soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.