Inspiration: J.K. Rowling on the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination

Dedy Sofyan — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:20:41 +0000

Saw a rerun of Oprah’s interview with Jo Rowling,
well-known first self-made billionaire female children’s book author, made famous and known by her initial J.K. Rowling.

Looking back, she recalled that no publishers wanted to publish her book, twelve publishers turned her down. She also recalled that editors kept reminding her that children’s book won’t see big commercial success but she went on and kept writing.
Then it was the thirteenth publisher, thirteen’s the charm, took them to the single most successful children’s book franchise in history of mankind, paving its way in becoming Hollywood’s most successful movie franchise of all time, as well. The budget for the total of eight Harry Potter movies in the franchise: $1,155,000,000. The box office for all eight movies in total reached $7,642,955,524.

Seeing that Harry Potter books and movies franchise have come to a close. Rowling said it was like saying goodbye to a friend, it was hard, and one of the most heartfelt moment of one of the chapters of her life. Especially when she remembers that a young girl came up to her and said “you are my childhood.”

During the interview, Rowling shared about the appeal of magic: “We ourselves have power and we can shape our world.” She also shared more about failure and imagination, referring to her 2008 Harvard Commencement Address (video and some of the text as follows).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/06/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

[...]
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So 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. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but 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.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. 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.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not 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.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense.
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.
In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
[...]
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.

You might also want to read my previous post about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter here: http://sys-talk.com/inspiration/libera-mentem-nil-desperandum/

References:

No related posts.

The “Fail?” Whale

Dedy Sofyan — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 06:24:09 +0000

Meet the “Fail Whale”…

The Fail Whale, originally entitled "Lifting up a Dreamer" by Yiying Lu

the image that is shown when the infamous micro-blogging site, Twitter, is overloaded.
For those of you who are not familiar with Twitter, it is a social networking site where users can post a 140-character long of sentences, to express and announce anything from the party they’re gonna attend or about the movie that they just watched, pretty much like your facebook.com‘s status updates or the karma-driven plurk entries at plurk.com.

Twitter is currently down for unplanned maintenance doh?

Most sites show a relatively boring and annoying “not found” and “site currently down” page to their users during down time or when their user stumble upon a broken link.

Twitter, however, chose to express empathy to their users during down time. Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, chose an illustration, that best illustrates the teamwork at Twitter working to resolve the problem, on iStockPhoto a while back.

The Fail Whale Artist, Yiying Lu, photo by Nick Cubbin

The image is an image of a flock of birds (associated with the Twitter bird) are lifting a smiling whale from the ocean. The effect was found so effective and so touching. The users are entertained by the cute smiling whale being lifted by the flock of birds, instead. Some users suggested that they give the whale a name. Later the whale finally got a name: “Fail Whale”, a name coined by one of the fans and twitter users.

The Fail Whale

The “fail whale” became so popular, that it spawned lots of fans, fan sites, fan pages and groups. One fan, even contacted the original creator of the “fail whale”, Ms. Yiying Lu to inform her of her work that is now popular among twitter users world-wide. Ms. Lu, who at first is unaware of Twitter when she first created and uploaded the illustration to iStockPhoto, suddenly has gained a lot of supporters and fans of her artwork. I can only imagined the surprise and the excitement she felt when she found out that her work is used on a very famous micro-blogging site.

Soon, fans found out the real back story of the “fail whale”, which was originally named “Lifting Up a Dreamer” and was intended as an e-card for her friend overseas. Ms. Lu suddenly became as famous as her friendly smiling whale.

You can find many articles about her and her whales all over the news and the internet:

Fans fell in love with the whale and instead of frowns, the cute whale made people smile during down time. So you can really call it a failure, can’t you? Because it really served its purpose and grew into a global icon. Not only that, many “fail whale” t-shirts and mugs have been sold to numerous of fans.

Lessons Learned

So, you have to remember that being famous and successful is perhaps only a click away in this era. Just remember the fail whale. “Success” is only a swim or a lift away from “failure”, just keep smiling.

Check out some of the sites about the “Fail Whale”:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2008/07/twitter-fans-tu/