Harvard Magazine has a transcript of J.K. Rowling’s commencement speech where she talks about benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. Her speech is elegant, humorous, very inspiring and a must read. Here are a few quotes from her speech:
“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because 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. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
“…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 to me than any qualification I ever earned.”
“Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”
“One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”
Scientific American has an incredible article based on a discussion with three experts on creativity. Here are some quotes from the article which resounded with me:
“There’s so much power in a new idea taking shape and changing the way people live and act. Often the rest of us are in awe, or we are even afraid of a new idea, and sometimes our fears spur us to learn more about it.”
“There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”-preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. ”
“The second competency is called “challenging”-giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections-so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.”
“You have to put up with dry spells and keep creating in the face of them.”
“You have to learn not to fear failure and even to rejoice in it. ”
“The creative individual thinks of failure as a new opportunity.”
“…failure actually stimulates creativity directly. It really is valuable.”
“I think that creativity is contagious and that the best thing we can do for children is to model for them what it’s like to be a creative individual.”
Published on Wednesday June 4, 2008 · Filed under: Entertainment .
Youtube videos can now contain links to other Youtube videos and can also contain annotations (think VH1’s pop-up video). This news is MAJOR! Think about all the possibilities!!!!!
You gotta check it out RIGHT NOW!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw6YPh-fAko
