The upside of failure
In this TED TALK video , Harry Potter author, JK Rowlings, gives the commencement speech at Harvard University, June 2008 about the upside of failure.
Here are a few titbits of her talk.
- There is an expiry date on making your parents responsible for everything.
- Poverty is romanticised only by fools.
- What constitutes failure? For Harvard grads, failure may well equate to success for most people.
- Failure means a stripping away of the inessential, and forced Rowlings to go with the one dream that she had, to write about her big idea.
- Some failure is inevitable, unless you live so cautiously.
- Failure gave an inner security and a discipline.
- Failure tests relationships and is worth more than any qualification.
- Personal happiness is not a checklist of achievement, and life is not a CV of victories.
- Imagination is the power that enables us to empathise with beings we have never met or imagined.
- Choosing to live in mentally and imaginatively narrow spaces brings its own agrophobia.
- What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
These points assembled by Mark O’Brien
Share The upside of failure on Facebook
Leave a Reply