In JK Rowlings Speech The Fringe

In J.K. Rowling’s speech “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” she explains how failure is not always a bad thing. I mean, at the moment it is, but in the long run it normally works out to your advantage. She talks about how her parents always thought that her active imagination was not really a very good thing because it would never pay a mortgage or any other payments, but she always felt like she was destined to be a story writer. She says that failure to a graduate from Harvard is probably completely different than the average person’s failure. To the average person even getting in to Harvard would be a huge success. She goes to say that failure for her taught her many lessons that have shaped her to who she is today. In Rowling’s speech I connected with a lot of her quotes. I feel like they spoke to me more than the big picture that she was trying to get across. The first quote is “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.” This quote speaks to me because I was having second thoughts about college. I did not know if it was the best thing for me, because at the time I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but as I have started taking psychology I have realized that this is what I am interested in. Everyone else was telling me that I need to go to college to get a good job and that I need to be successful, but the fact is there are plenty of people that make a perfectly fine living that have never touched a book since junior high. I just feel like before you try to tell people how to live their life you need to make sure that you have your life in check. Another quote that I connected with is “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.” I feel like this quote should speak to a lot of people