'The Benefits
of Failure’ commencement speech By J.K. Rowling delivered June 5, 2008 at
Harvard University
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 honour, but the weeks of
fear and nausea I have endured 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 convince myself that I am at
the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
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, the
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 come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable
goals: the first step to self 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 have 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 may 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 would never
pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the
force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they 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 the 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 criticise 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.
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 that 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 then 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 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.
So given 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.
Now 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 personally 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 at the African 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 speak against their governments. Visitors to
our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find
out what had happened to those they had left 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 back 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 had to give 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 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 leads 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
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
change. 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,
people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took 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 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.
