J.K. Rowling Harvard CommencementSpeech 2008

'The Fringe Benefits ofFailure, and the Importance of Imagination'

Text of J.K. Rowling’s speech

President Faust,members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers,members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to sayis ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but theweeks of fear and nausea I have endured at thethought of giving this commencement address havemade me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deepbreaths, squint at the red banners and convincemyself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindorreunion.

Delivering a commencement addressis a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my owngraduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished Britishphilosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting onher speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns outthat I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberatingdiscovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promisingcareers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delightsof becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember inyears to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’vecome out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock.Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say toyou today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation,and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expiredbetween that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. Onthis wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academicsuccess, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And asyou stand on the threshold of what is sometimescalled ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucialimportance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxicalchoices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-oldthat I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasybalance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to meexpected of me.

I was convinced that the only thingI wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whomcame from impoverished backgrounds and neitherof whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination wasan amusing personal quirk that would never pay amortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force ofa cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take avocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise wasreached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, andI went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded thecorner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling myparents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for thefirst time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think theywould have been hard put to name one less useful thanGreek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for theirpoint of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment youare old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, Icannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty.They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agreewith them that it is not an ennoblingexperience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; itmeans a thousand petty humiliations andhardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeedsomething on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself atyour age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinctlack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffeebar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years,had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dullenough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, youhave never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the capriceof the Fates, and I do not for a moment supposethat everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffledprivilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you aregraduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fearof failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception offailure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so highhave you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decidefor ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to giveyou a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by anyconventional measure, a mere seven years aftermy graduation da