JK Rowling gave a rather good speech about the benefits of failure, at Harvard. Pretty good stuff, too. Full transcript here.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
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. So I think it fair to say that by 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, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
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. So I think it fair to say that by 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, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
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.
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 rubies.
I think this has to be one of the better speeches out there. Like she said, everyone's concept of failure is relative. I once had someone tell me that I wouldn't really understand certan things because I have never truly failed before, and it is true to the extent that I have never truly objectively failed the way Rowling had, but I had experienced failure to a personally unacceptable degree nonetheless. You really do learn alot about life, because more often than not, people don't sit down to reflect until shit hits the fan and the shock of it all breaks through.
It is true that failure is liberating - it gives you that sense of security that Rowling mentioned because hell, you're already in a shithole, so there's really nothing left to lose. Things can only go up from there because you really can't go any lower. When you're flying hgh like a Harvard graduate, you have so many things that you risk losing, that you end up going the "safe" way all the time for fear of losing what you already have. Many times I find myself entertaining the notion that I might be a much happier person if I was more of a failure. If you know you're not capable of great things, you become satisfied with being a normal person with a normal life and all, since that is the limit of your capabilities. But when you sense that you can do so much more, you just have to try. I remember someone once saying that it is a sin if you have the ability to do something and you don't. I totally agree.
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