JK Rowlings Commencement Address

Watch and listen to JK Rowling's commencement address even if you are not a fan of Harry Potter book series. It's inspiring, thoughtful and full of wisdom.

You may then realize that there are benefits from failure and how important and powerful it is to use your imagination.

Here are some of J.K. Rowling's quotes that I find inspiring.

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.

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.

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 empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

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.

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 realised, 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.