“J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement.” YouTube. YouTube, 15 Sept. 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2013. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGqp8lz36c.
One of the big ideas that Rowling brings up deals with the benefits that come with failure and the crucial importance of imagination. She spoke on how failure strips down everything in life to the bare essentials. It allowed her to truly conceive what was important to her and what is important in life. She found out that when she was at rock bottom, it was then that she reevaluated herself and pursued the things that mattered to her. Failure can teach others things about themselves that they might not have learned otherwise. Imagination is the power to reinvent and innovate. It is the ability to think outside the box and discover new things.
In Rowling’s speech, she uses many personal examples from her own life to correlate to the people that she is talking to. She starts off by talking about the commencement speech at her own graduation and how she didn’t remember a thing from it. She then spoke profoundly about a gay wizard (presumably speaking about Dumbledore). This random outlandish topic that she brought up was an effective way of getting the audience to pay attention to what she was saying.
At another point in the speech, she speaks about how she went to college for one thing, even though she was purely interested in writing novels. She related this to the importance of imagination, and left the audience with a message to think outwardly and with an open mind. This story that she told was very effective, as she made it to where she is now based on her willfulness and imagination to pursue what she wanted to do.
“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 have failed by default.” This quote is very important, as it pertains to the idea that we need to take chances in life. If J.K. Rowling didn’t take the chance to write her own story and let her voice be heard, who knows whether or not if she would have written all of the Harry Potter books.
“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive.” This is an important quote as it talks about how in order to learn more about ourselves, we must test our abilities, or else we will not know what could have been. This goes along with the first quote as it basically says that people must test adversity, in order to learn about ourselves and life itself.
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