J. K. Rowling on the Benefits of Failure

In her 2008 commencement address at Harvard (with crimson banners all around, the event was for her the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion) J. K. Rowling told the graduates and proud parents that 21 years before, she graduated and failed “on an epic scale” and entered a dark impoverished period in her life. That tunnel of failure became the basis of her success:

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.

She finished the address quoting Seneca:

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