Experiencing Failure

My daughter recently sent me a link to an interesting read: the commencement address given by J.K. Rowling (the successful author of the Harry Potter books) at Harvard in June 2008. Ironically, her topic is not "How to Make Millions Writing a Best Seller" - which she has done - but “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination," in which she tells how, in her words, "rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

Her talk made me reflect on my own crushed dreams - and how these disappointments steered me away from certain courses of action, and towards others.

I have always admired people who get right back on the horse they have just fallen off of, so to speak. Successful athletes have that kind of dogged determination. But that's not my style. I need more time to recover and "heal": after failing at something that matters to me, I tend to back off, re-evaluate, and then - if I am still interested - go back, approaching the situation from a different angle. I try not to fail twice in exactly the same way!

As for poverty (which went hand-in-hand with Rowling's early "failures") - I have always valued the years when I had to count every penny. They taught me so much. That's why I have never wished for any of my children to experience financial success early in life, though of course, I always wanted them to have enough money to be able to follow their dreams. For me, struggling financially forced me to decide what was truly important to me... The experience of being poor - and knowing that I could still be happy living a simple life, without a lot of money - was an important lesson for me to learn. It is a lesson I would like them to learn as well...

Of course, I always had enough to meet my basic needs - but learning what those basic needs were was what it was all about.

In retrospect, it is interesting to see how "failures" in life are often the greatest learning experiences of all - if, of course, one is able to move on and learn from them, and eventually experience a measure of success.