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Evan Bartlett (@ev_bartlett
Mar 31, 2015
JK Rowling speaking at Harvard's Commencement ceremony in 2008
JK Rowling's latest book acts as something of a self-help manual; charting what she learned from being “the biggest failure I knew” to becoming one of the most celebrated authors on the planet.
Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination is based on the speech Rowling gave to Harvard graduates at the prestigious university's Commencement ceremony in 2008.
In what Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust called “the most moving and memorable” speech she’d ever heard, Rowling advised students on what she calls "the benefits of failure".
Now, I’m not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life is 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.
- JK Rowling
Reflecting on her own time at university, in which she "spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures", Rowling offered the students advice on what to expect from life, warning that "some failure 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.
- JK Rowling
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