The Benefits Of Failure.docx

THE BENEFITS OF FAILURE Rowling, delivering a commencement speech at Harvard University graduates, remembered her own graduation day. She refers to the achievable goals, which are the first step towards self-improvement. Reflecting on the 21 year-period between her graduation day and the commencement speech, she decides to talk to the graduates about the benefits of failure and also the importance of imagination. She continues on saying that what she feared the most when she was a graduate, was not poverty, but instead failure, and that failure must be measure individually by each person. Citing herself as an example, what she considered failure was being divorced, being a single-mother and being jobless. She overcame that fear when she realized that she had all she needed: she was alive, she had a daughter, an old typewriter and a “big idea”. She alleges that if someone lives so cautiously so as not to fail, that person has not lived at all and failed by default.