J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement

J.K. Rowling’s 2008 Harvard commencement speech was published in 2015 as an illustrated book, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (Sphere), and sold in aid of Lumos and university-wide financial aid at Harvard.

Achievable goals.

1. Benefits of failure – Threshhold of real life – Ambition for self and those who love us, their ambition for us. Overactive imagination, - There is an expiry date for blaming your parents, for shaping your future – the moment you have the ability to take responsibility.

Poverty – 1000 petty humiliation and hardship – Fear was not poverty but failure. 

It is impossible to live without failure – It means life itself is a failure

Strong will and discipline; friends who are value – knowledge : wiser and stronger, tested by adversity – True but painful gift better than any qualification. Life is not a checklist of acquisitions, life is difficult and complicated and behind anyone's control. To human 

2. Value of Imagination – Uniquely human capacity – more transformative capacity. After working as a researcher and bilingual secretary in London for Amnesty International – people whose life shattered by cruelty.  Can learn and understand without experience, which can be utilized and exercised in may ways. Wilfully unimaginative more scare.

Fortunate to live in democratic country – Greed – people have for power ; - Learned human goodness. The power of human empathy. What we achieve inwardly will help change the outside. 

We do not need magic, 

People at graduation – friends for life. Similar friendship today – Tomorrow – Synica – As is the tail, so is the life – not how long it is , but how good it is ; is all that matters.