Llloyd Jones (who tragically/hilariously failed to grad­u­ate uni­ver­sity because of library fines) once said that ‘’the men who try to do some­thing and fail are infi­nitely bet­ter than those who try to do noth­ing and suc­ceed.’’ We’ve all heard a lot of quotes like this grow­ing up (though rarely from peo­ple who failed to grad­u­ate because of library fines). Win­ston Churchill said that, “suc­cess is the abil­ity to go from one fail­ure to another with no loss of enthu­si­asm.” That ‘the path to suc­cess is paved with nec­es­sary fail­ure’ is maybe the com­mon­est of admo­ni­tions when things go wrong.

Like­wise, the uber-successful always, at some point, seem to credit their suc­cess with their own will­ing­ness to make mis­takes. And yet for some strange rea­son, I’d still rather win.

Can Harry Pot­ter help?

If you’re any­thing like me you prob­a­bly don’t go look­ing to JK Rowl­ing for advice on most of the impor­tant mat­ters in life (except, if you’re like me, at Hal­loween). How­ever, in the Spring of 2008 Har­vard Uni­ver­sity did. She was asked to address the grad­u­at­ing class. I imag­ine more than a few Har­var­dians feel a kin­dred con­nec­tion to the magically-gifted char­ac­ters at Hog­warts. (And yes, they really do call them­selves ‘’Harvardians”).

In her speech Rawl­ings dis­cussed fail­ure and imag­i­na­tion, and (sur­prise, sur­prise) the neces­sity of fail­i­ure. Her insights are fresh and worth read­ing (or watch­ing). I’ve listed my favorite below the video.

J. K. Rowl­ing On failure:

[For her]… 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.

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 qual­i­fi­ca­tion I ever earned.

J.K. Rowl­ing on imagination:

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.

Greek author Plutarch: ‘’What we achieve inwardly will change our 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.

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 advan­tages, 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 change the world, we carry all the power we need inside our­selves already: we have the power to imag­ine better.

My two cents

All of this actu­ally makes me think about pol­i­tics –about how the social­ist imag­i­na­tion is rooted in an under­stand­ing of inevitable fail­ure. (It’s not inevitable all the time, but sometimes).Whereas the cap­i­tal­ist (fis­cally right-wing) imag­i­na­tion is rooted in an under­stand­ing of what it takes to be suc­cess­ful. The two sides focus on dif­fer­ent aspects of suc­cess (free­dom from harm and suf­fer­ing, ver­sus the free­dom to suc­ceed) and each per­spec­tive car­ries its own lim­i­ta­tions and advantages.

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