THE BENEFITS OF FAILURE

You were born with an overactive imagination and you liked to write stories.

One of your first stories, written when you were five, is about a rabbit called ‘Rabbit.’

He has a friend who is a bee. He is called ‘Miss Bee.’

This imaginative flair persists into teenagerhood. Your good friend Sean reads some of your early stories and is the first fan you ever have.

You reward him by featuring his battered Ford Anglia in a later story - one that actually gets published.

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you
 live so cautiously that you might has well not have lived at all, 
in which case you have failed by default."

Your teenage years are miserable. You have a difficult relationship with your father, your mother is often ill, and you are shy and awkward.

On leaving school, you apply for Oxford University but are rejected.

You get a place at Exeter, and want to study literature. Your parents are appalled. They tell you that you will never make money writing stupid stories.

"However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished 
backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view 
that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never
 pay a mortgage or secure a pension."

One day, while waiting for a train, you get a great idea for a book but you don’t have a pen to write down the details and you are too shy to ask for one.

But you remember the best bits and when you get home you finally make a start.

In the middle of writing your book you lose your mother to Multiple Sclerosis. She has been fighting the disease for ten years. Suddenly you know how your hero feels and some of your grief is enshrined in the book, when your hero looks in a mirror and sees his parents there.

You meet and marry your handsome prince; but he turns out to be a monster.

You are physically abused and he throws you and your baby daughter out of the house at five o’clock one morning.

"Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the 
caprice of the fates."

You leave him and work full time while bringing up your daughter as a single parent. You spend the next few years living on social security benefits.

Seven years after graduating from university, you see yourself as a monumental failure.

"I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I 
still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and 
a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I 
rebuilt my life."

You are diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplate suicide. (But even this gives you the idea for some characters in your book.)

You take refuge in your Big Idea. Your novel is full of the smart, funny, and interesting people you had wished to be when you were a teenager

After 3 years your Big Idea is finished, but it is rejected by almost every publisher who sees it.

"I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's 
totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this 
popularity."

Finally a publisher offers you a miniscule advance but tells you not to give up your day job, because you’ll never make any money writing.

He’s right. Your book is not an immediate success. You spend the following years living on literary grants and government benefits. In fact, it is another two books before you are finally able to give up teaching.

Without guarantee of reward you continue to fight for your vision. You will not abandon the series, shorten it, give up on it or compromise.

Today you are worth $798 million, and are the twelfth richest woman in the United Kingdom.

"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."

The above story and quotes belong to JK Rowling.

I have included, below, the video of her address,‘The Benefits of Failure’, which she presented at Harvard in 2005.

This is the funniest and most moving tribute to failure you’ll ever hear, from one of the most successful writers of our times.

Listen, and be inspired.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGqp8lz36c&w=420&h=315]