— unpredictable thoughts

J.K. Rowl­ing Speaks at Har­vard Com­mence­ment from Har­vard Mag­a­zine on Vimeo.

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. — J.K. Rowl­ing

Watch the whole speech, really. It was quite amaz­ing to lis­ten to the wis­dom and chal­lenge that the author put before this grad­u­at­ing class at Har­vard. How she reminded them of their priv­i­lege yet embraced their achieve­ments. How she reminded us all of the value of imag­in­ing and act­ing on behalf of others.

on fail­ure :

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 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.

on imag­i­na­tion :

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 empathise with humans whose expe­ri­ences we have never shared.

You can read the full text of the speech here : Har­vard Magazine