JK Rowling's Commencement Address at Harvard

panalo ito mga kapatid. nakakatuwa at nakaka-inspire.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

by J.K. Rowling
June 5, 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation
and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents,
and,
above all, graduates:

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has
Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and
nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement
address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have
to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself
into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter
convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I
thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The
commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British
philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock.

Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this
one,
because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said.
This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that
I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in
business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay
wizard. You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay
wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock.
Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to
you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own
graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years
that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers.

On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your
academic
success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure.
And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real
life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. These
might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a
slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has
become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance
between
the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected
of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to
write
novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished
backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view
that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that
could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that
I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English
Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied
nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages.

Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road
than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor. I
cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they
might well have found out for the first time on graduation day.

Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put
to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing
the keys to an executive bathroom. I would like to make it clear, in
parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view.
There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in
the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel,
responsibility lies with you.

What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would
never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have
since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an
ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes
depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.
Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something
on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only
by
fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but
failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university,
where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and
far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing
examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in
my life and that of my peers.

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.

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 the one arena I believed I truly belonged.
I was set free, because my greatest fear had already 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 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 to
me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old
self that 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.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of
imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but
that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime
stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a
much
broader sense.

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.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry
Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those
books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day
jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch
hours,
I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department
at Amnesty International' s headquarters in London .

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled
out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking
imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to
them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace,
sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the
testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I
opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and
executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had
been
displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the
temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our
office included those who had come to give information, or to try and
find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave
behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older
than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had
endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into
a
video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot
taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the
job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this
man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with
exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty
corridor
and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and
horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the
researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink
for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news
that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's
regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how
incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a
democratically
elected government, where legal representation and a public trial
were
the rights of everyone. Every day, I saw more evidence about the
evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or
maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about
some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty
International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilizes
thousands of people who
have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on
behalf
of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective
action,
saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal
well-being
and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save
people
they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that
process
was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and
understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves
into
other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is
morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or
control, just as much as to understand or sympathize.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They
choose
to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience,
never
troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than
they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages;
they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not
touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that
I
do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to
live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and
that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see
more monsters. They are often more
afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable
real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil
ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor
down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I
could
not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What
we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times
every
day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection
with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives
simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch
other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work,
the education you have earned and received, give you unique status,
and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart.
The
great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining
superpower.
The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure
you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your
borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

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 transform for the better. We do not need magic to change
the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already:
we
have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is
something
that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation
day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents,
the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble,
friends
who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names
for
Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection,
by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and,
of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic
evidence
that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime
Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And
tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine,
you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when
I
fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in
search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it
is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

2008 Harvard University Commencement,
June 5, 2008. Copyright of J.K. Rowling, June 2008