Fringe Benefits

I have just re-read J.K. Rowling's 2008 commencement speech at Harvard entitled The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination. Reading it now, I find it inspiring and...appropriate. Two years may have expired since my own graduation, but for some reason, I still feel like I'm standing on the threshold of something big. Or are we always on the threshold of something? 


Anyway, the lines that struck me the most are -

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.

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.

Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

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.

You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.

Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not... it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

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