Recounting her struggle through an extremely short-lived marriage, becoming a single parent, and being jobless, author JK Rowling talks about the “benefits of failure” in this speech at Harvard in 2008. “Failure means the stripping away of the inessential. If I had succeeded at anything else, I might have never found the determination to succeed at the one arena where I truly belonged. So, rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life,” she mentions in this video.
“Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something. Unless you have lived cautiously, you might not have failed at all, but in which case, you might have failed by default. Failure taught me better things about my own self,” she shares.
