graduation talk

Archive for the ‘2008 Speeches’ Category

J.K. Rowling had taken the path less traveled by other commencement speakers. Instead of talking about great success ahead of the graduates, she focused on the importance of failure and the power of imagination.

Rowling allowed her audience to enter her own “pensieve” and use it to review her memories before Harry Potter became famous. It was a quick flash back of her parents’ poverty, college days’ dilemma, marriage issues, early failures and struggle as a single mom. She also shared her life-changing experience while working for Amnesty International.

On the second part of her speech, Rowling educated the graduates on how to overcome life’s failures with their own imagination. She stressed that we all had the power to view life in another person’s perspective and to live in someone else’s shoes through imagination. If we want to change the world into a better place, we must start within ourselves.

Here are some of the winning points of the speech:

• 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. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
• 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.

This is the video and transcript of the commencement address by J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivered on June 5, 2008 at Harvard University.

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