Every summer following tradition, the world’s top university Harvard, goes out to honor one special VIP guest and invites him or her to give a speech to the graduating students of that year in what is now infamously known as the “Harvard Commencement Address.”
Last year, their special guest of honor was no other than J K Rowling.
To many of you who have not read J K Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Address 2008, I will attempt to give you a synopsis of it.
To those who have read the full text of her speech, perhaps a gentle reminder thru’ this synopsis of her learned thoughts wouldn’t hurt.
The theme of her speech was: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Crucial Importance of Imagination.
I hope we can learn a thing or two from her exhortations.
I take it that you know who J.K. Rowling is. Yes, she is the creator /author of the Harry Potter novels which not too long ago took the world by storm! The popularity and success of the Harry Potter series brought her fame and fortune.
She is now 42 years of age and has easily become one of the richest women in the UK, a billionaire many times over in her own right. However, life had not been a bed of roses in her growing up years.
The theme of her speech at Harvard was expressed quite simply under 2 rather paradoxical choices of human endeavors i.e. (1) failure, as in human failings and (2) imagination.
She went on to tell us of her life experiences/ encounters and how from these, lessons in life can be drawn.
She grew up in humble surroundings as her parents had been poor. She told us that being poor was certainly not an “ennobling experience”. In her words, poverty entailed fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it meant 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 was said to be romanticized only by fools!
One may be born poor but certainly one need not remain poor, the thing is to have the will-power or determination to succeed in a niche or to excel “in the one arena that you believed you truly belonged”.
However, what is to be feared is not poverty, but failure. Everyone has had some failure in life. It is evitable. She said, “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”.
Now for the benefits of failure, if I may paraphrase some text from her speech:
The rock bottom that you may find yourself in, could actually become the foundation on which to rebuild your life. Failure teaches us things about ourselves that we could have learned no other way. We emerge wiser and stronger, having survived in insecurity and tested by adversity and just to know that indeed is a true gift. We rediscover ourselves, our talents, our true friends and find that life is once again worth living.
Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you might meet with people who actually disagree. But what most would agree to is this, that life is beyond anyone’s total control. The humility to know that life is not a check-list of acquisitions or achievements, therein lies true personal happiness but more importantly this knowledge sets us free and enables us to do things which we may not have the courage to do before. Hence, there are benefits from failure!
The second theme of her speech was on the crucial importance of imagination. She argued that imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation, it is also the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
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. However, there are some people quite self-centered, who prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all.
She thinks that the willfully unimaginative are people with no empathy. They close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they refuse to know; never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than who they are. Apathy versus an empathy ‘self’, now which are you?
However note what the famous Greek author Plutarch said: “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality”.
It expresses in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, whether we like it or not, the fact is that we will touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
We can imagine a better world and use our status and influence to change the status quo that it is in if we truly want to. We do not need magic to change the world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; for we have the power to imagine better. When imaginations are translated into actions, lives will be impacted and transformed. Who says that we cannot make a difference?
In her closing remarks, she extolled the value of true friendships, friends to whom you can turn to in times of trouble, indeed friends who are there for you for life. Therefore, never ever under estimate the value of a friend.
In conclusion she quoted Seneca, “ As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters”.
End of my synopsis.
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