Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
Author: Rowling, J. K.
Date: 2015-04-14
Rights: 2015

Copyright © 2008 by J.K. Rowling
Cover design by Mario J. Pulice
Cover art by Joel Holland
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
littlebrown.com
twitter.com/littlebrown
facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany

First ebook edition: April 2015
Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Little, Brown Book Group.

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Book design by Mario J. Pulice
Illustrations by Joel Holland, © 2015 by Little, Brown and Company

ISBN 978-0-316-36914-5
E3

President Faust, members of the

Harvard Corporation and the

Board of Overseers, members of
the faculty, proud parents, and,
above all, graduates.

thank
you

The first thing I would like to
say is “thank you.” Not only has

Harvard given me an extraordi-
nary honor, but the weeks of
fear and nausea I have endured
at the thought of giving this com-
mencement address have made
me lose weight. A win-win sit-
uation! Now all I have to do is
take deep breaths, squint at the
red banners, and convince myself
that I am at the world’s largest

Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address
is a great responsibility, or so I thought
until I cast my mind back to my
own graduation. The commencement
speaker that day was the distinguished

British philosopher Baroness Mary

Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has
helped me enormously in writing this one,
because it turns out that I can’t remember
a single word she said. This liberating
discovery enables me to proceed without
any fear that I might inadvertently
influence you to abandon promising
careers in business, the law, or politics
for the giddy delights of becoming a
gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in
years to come is the “gay wizard”

joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baro-
ness Mary Warnock. Achievable
goals: the first step to self-
improvement.

Actually, I have racked my mind
and heart for what I ought to say to
you today. I have asked myself
what I wish I had known at
my own graduation, and what
important lessons I have learned in
the twenty-one years that have
expired between that day and this.

The
Importance
of
IMAgiNATiON

I have come up with two answers.

On this wonderful day when we are
gathered together to celebrate your
academic success, I have decided to talk
to you about the benefits of failure.

And as you stand on the threshold of
what is sometimes called “real life,”

I want to extol the crucial importance
of imagination.

UNEASY

BALANCE

These may seem quixotic or paradox-
ical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the twenty-one-year-
old that I was at graduation is a slightly
uncomfortable experience for the forty-
two-year-old that she has become.

Half my lifetime ago, I was striking
an uneasy balance between the
ambition I had for myself and what
those closest to me expected of me.

personal
quirk

I was convinced that the only
thing I wanted to do, ever, was write
novels. 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 personal quirk that would
never pay a mortgage or secure a
pension. I know that the irony strikes
with the force of a cartoon anvil
now.

So they hoped that I would take a
vocational degree; I wanted to study

English Literature. A compromise was
reached that in retrospect satisfied
nobody, and I went up to study

Modern Languages. Hardly had my
parents’ car rounded the corner at
the end of the road than I ditched

German and scuttled off down the

Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my
parents that I was studying Classics;
they might well have found out
for the first time on graduation day.

Of all the subjects on this planet, I
think they would have been hard
put to name one less useful than

Greek mythology when it came to
securing the keys to an executive
bathroom.

I would like to make it clear,
in parenthesis, that I do not
blame my parents for their
point of view. There is an
expiration date on blaming
your parents for steering you
in the wrong direction; the
moment you are old enough to
take the wheel, responsibility
lies with you. What is more,

I cannot criticize my parents
for hoping that I would never
experience poverty. They had
been poor themselves, and I
have since been poor, and I
quite agree with them that it is
not an ennobling experience.

Poverty entails fear, and stress,
and sometimes depression; it
means a thousand petty humil-
iations and hardships. Climb-
ing out of poverty by your
own efforts—that is something
on which to pride yourself,
but poverty itself is roman-
ticized only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at
your age was not poverty but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct
lack of motivation at university,
where I had spent far too long in the
coffee bar writing stories and far too
little time at lectures, I had a knack
for passing examinations, and that,
for years, had been the measure of
success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose
that because you are young, gift-
ed, and well-educated, you have
never known hardship or heartache.

Talent and intelligence never yet
inoculated anyone against the ca-
price of the Fates, and I do not for
a moment suppose that everyone
here has enjoyed an existence of un-
ruffled privilege and contentment.

So
high
have
you
already
flown

However, the fact that you are
graduating from Harvard suggests
that you are not very well acquainted
with failure. You might be driven
by a fear of failure quite as much as
a desire for success. Indeed, your
conception of failure might not be
too far removed from the average
person’s idea of success, so high
have you already flown.

I was the
biggest
failure
I knew

Ultimately we all have to decide for
ourselves what constitutes failure, but
the world is quite eager to give you a
set of criteria, if you let it. So I think
it fair to say that by any conventional
measure, a mere seven years after my
graduation day, I had failed on an epic
scale. An exceptionally short-lived
marriage had imploded, and I was job-
less, a lone parent, and as poor as it is
possible to be in modern Britain
without being homeless. The fears that
my parents had had for me, and that I
had had for myself, had both come to
pass, and by every usual standard I was
the biggest failure I knew.

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 any-
thing else, I might never have found
the determination to succeed in the
one arena where I believed I truly
belonged. I was set free, because my
greatest fear had been realized, 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 foun-
dation 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 qualifi-
cation I’ve ever earned.

humility

So given a Time-Turner, I would
tell my twenty-one-year-old self
that personal happiness lies in
knowing that life is not a checklist
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 any-
one’s total control, and the humil-
ity 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 capa-
city, it is the power that enables us
to empathize with humans whose
experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative
experiences of my life preceded

Harry Potter, though it informed
much of what I subsequently wrote
in those books. This revelation came
in the form of one of my earliest
day jobs. Though I was sloping off
to write stories during my lunch
hours, I paid the rent in my early
twenties by working at the African
research department of Amnesty

International’s headquarters in Lon-
don.

There in my little office I read
hastily scribbled letters smuggled
out of totalitarian regimes by men
and women who were risking
imprisonment to inform the out-
side world of what was happening
to them. I saw photographs of
those who had disappeared without
a trace, sent to Amnesty by their
desperate families and friends. I
read the testimony of torture
victims and saw pictures of their
injuries. I opened handwritten eye-
witness accounts of summary trials
and executions, of kidnappings
and rapes.

Many of my coworkers
were ex–political prisoners,
people who had been dis-
placed from their homes or
fled into exile because they
had the temerity to speak
against their governments.

Visitors to our offices in-
cluded those who had come
to give information, or to
try to find out what had
happened to those they had
left behind.

I shall never forget the African
torture victim, a young man no
older than I was at the time, who
had become mentally ill after all he
had endured in his homeland. He
trembled uncontrollably as he spoke
into a video camera about the
brutality inflicted upon him. He was
a foot taller than I was and seemed
as fragile as a child. I was given the
job of escorting him back to the

Underground station afterward, and
this man whose life had been
shattered by cruelty took my hand
with exquisite courtesy and wished
me future happiness.

A
SCREAM
OF
PAIN
AND
HORROR

And as long as I live I shall
remember walking along an empty
corridor and suddenly hearing,
from behind a closed door, a
scream of pain and horror such as

I have never heard since. The door
opened, and the researcher poked
out her head and told me to run
and make a hot drink for the
young man sitting with her. She
had just had to give him the news
that, in retaliation for his own out-
spokenness against his country’s
regime, his mother had been seized
and executed.

POWER

Every day of my working week in
my early twenties, I was reminded
how incredibly fortunate I was to
live in a country with a democrat-
ically elected government, where le-
gal representation and a public tri-
al were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence of
the evils humankind will inflict on
their fellow humans to gain or
maintain power. I began to have
nightmares, literal nightmares, about
some of the things I saw, heard, and
read.

And yet I also learned more about human
goodness at Amnesty International than

I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people
who have never been tortured or im-
prisoned for their beliefs to act on be-
half of those who have. The power of
human empathy leading to collective ac-
tion saves lives and frees prisoners. Ordi-
nary people, whose personal well-being
and security are assured, join togeth-
er in huge numbers to save people they
do not know and will never meet. My
small participation in that process was
one of the most humbling and inspiring
experiences of my life.

They
can
think
themselves
into
other
people’s
places

Unlike any other creature on
this planet, human beings can learn
and understand without having
experienced. They can think them-
selves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like
my brand of fictional magic, that is
morally neutral. One might use such
an ability to manipulate or control
just as much as to understand or
sympathize.

They
can
refuse
to
know

And many prefer not to exercise
their imaginations at all. They choose
to remain comfortably within the
bounds of their own experience,
never troubling to wonder how it
would feel to have been born other
than they are. They can refuse to hear
screams or to peer inside cages; they
can close their minds and hearts to
any suffering that does not touch
them personally; they can refuse to
know.

I might be tempted to envy people
who can live that way, except that I
do not think they have any fewer
nightmares than I do. Choosing to
live in narrow spaces leads to a form
of mental agoraphobia, and that brings
its own terrors. I think 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 it through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned
at the end of that Classics corridor,
down which I ventured at the age
of eighteen in search of something

I could not then define, was this,
written by the Greek author Plu-
tarch: “What we achieve inwardly
will change outer reality.”

That is an astonishing statement,
and yet proven a thousand times
every day of our lives. It expresses,
in part, our inescapable connection
with the outside world, the fact that
we touch other people’s lives simply
by existing.

But how much more are you,

Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to
touch other people’s lives? Your
intelligence, your capacity for hard
work, the education you have earned
and received, give you unique status
and unique responsibilities. Even your
nationality sets you apart. The great
majority of you belong to the world’s
only remaining superpower. The way
you vote, the way you live, the way
you protest, the pressure you bring
to bear on your government, has
an impact way beyond your borders.

That is your privilege, and your bur-
den.

If you choose to use your status
and influence to raise your voice on
behalf of those who have no voice;
if you choose to identify not only
with the powerful but with the
powerless; if you retain the ability
to imagine yourself into the lives of
those who do not have your advan-
tages, then it will not only be your
proud families who celebrate your
existence but thousands and millions
of people whose reality you have
helped change. We do not need
magic to transform our world; we
carry all the power we need inside
ourselves already: we have the power
to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one
last hope for you, which is some-
thing that I already had at twenty-
one. The friends with whom I sat
on graduation day have been my
friends for life. They are my
children’s godparents, the people to
whom I’ve been able to turn in
times of real trouble, people who
have been kind enough not to sue
me when I took their names for

Death Eaters. At our graduation we
were bound by enormous affection,
by our shared experience of a time
that could never come again, and, of
course, by the knowledge that we
held certain photographic evidence
that would be exceptionally valuable
if any of us ran for prime minister.

I wish
you all
very
good
lives

So today, I wish you nothing
better than similar friendships. And
tomorrow, I hope that even if you
remember not a single word of
mine, you remember those of Sen-
eca, another of those old Romans I
met when I fled down the Classics
corridor in retreat from career lad-
ders, in search of ancient wisdom:

“As is a tale, so is life: not how
long it is, but how good it is, is
what matters.”

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

About the Author

J.K. Rowling is the author of the best-
selling Harry Potter series of seven
books, published between 1997 and

2007, which have sold over 450
million copies worldwide, are distri-
buted in more than 200 territories, are
translated into 78 languages, and have
been turned into eight blockbuster
films. Her first novel for adult readers,

The Casual Vacancy, was published in

September 2012 and her first two
crime novels, written under the
pseudonym Robert Galbraith, were
published in 2013 and 2014 respec-
tively.

As well as receiving an OBE for
services to children’s literature, J.K.

Rowling supports a number of causes
through her charitable trust, Volant.

She is also the founder and president
of the children’s charity Lumos, which
works to end the institutionalization
of children globally and ensure all
children grow up in a safe and caring
environment.

I founded Lumos to help end the incredibly
damaging practice of institutionalization. As
many as eight million children are currently
being raised in institutions worldwide.

The overwhelming majority are not
orphans. A wealth of expert opinion agrees
that institutionalization is extremely damaging
to children’s mental and physical health and
has a dire effect on their life outcomes.

It is my dream that within our lifetime the
very idea of institutionalizing children will
seem to belong to a cruel fictional world.

—J.K. Rowling,
Founder and President of Lumos
wearelumos.org