What are the "benefits of failure" according to Rowling? Why do you think she discusses these?
As I was searching the wonderful TED annal of talks the other day, I came beyond the address that author J.K Rowling gave at Harvard Commencement in 2008. (Aside – the TED site/community is a great resource IMO and very much worth your fourth dimension). I've never read any of the Harry Potter books and am but vaguely familiar with Rowling'due south personal history every bit an impoverished unmarried female parent who became a mega-star author. Just I was blown away by her speech and would categorize it in the theology of the cantankerous realm– e.g. calling a affair a affair. In xx short minutes, she gives an inspired letters virtually the importance of having a low anthropology, the reality of failure, of evil, of 'imagination' every bit identification and of the need for help to come up not from inside – just from the outside.
J.M. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.
Some salient quotes:
one) Failure is existent, and everyone Will experience failure.
2) At the indicate of utter failure – "Stone Bottom became my solid foundation"
"Why do I talk near the benefits of failure? Just considering failure meant a stripping abroad of the inessential… I was set free, because my greatest fearfulness had been realized… Yous might never fail on the calibration I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to alive without declining at something. Unless you lot live so charily, that you might as well not have lived at all. In which case y'all failed by default. …"
3) "Life is hard, and complicated, and across anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes."
"… personal happiness lies in knowing that life is non a check-list of acquisition or achievement. 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.
"Unlike any other animal on this planet, humans tin can acquire and sympathize, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people'due south places.
"Of form, this is a power, similar my make of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or command, just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to do their imaginations at all. They cull to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how information technology would feel to have been built-in other than they are. They tin can decline to hear screams or to peer within cages; they can close their minds and hearts to whatever suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know."
4) "Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors."
"I might be tempted to envy people who can live that mode, except that I practice not call up they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to alive in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I call back the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with information technology, through our own apathy."
5) Evil is real
"Every solar day, I saw more evidence almost the evils humankind will inflict on their swain humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read."
6) Nosotros need help from exterior ourselves – and often that grace comes from total strangers.
"And yet I also learned more about homo goodness at Immunity International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who accept never been tortured or imprisoned for their behavior to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never run across. My small participation in that process was 1 of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life."
7) Strength in Weakness….
"If you lot choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to place not only with the powerful, only with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, and then information technology will not merely be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality y'all accept helped change."
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Source: https://mbird.com/literature/fringe-benefits-of-failure/
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