Failure

I recently came across the transcript of a speech by J.K. Rowling at Harvard¹. The speech is titled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination and I highly, highly recommend reading the speech (it’s not very long).

The “Fringe Benefits of Failure” part is really what resonated with me. Here’re a few excerpts that I particularly enjoyed reading:

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.²

I’ve seen this happen a lot. Loads of people romanticize poverty, and make it sound like a good thing. It’s not. Poverty sucks. Fortunately, I’ve never had to experience it myself (and I hope I never will), but I’ve seen plenty of people who have and that’s enough for me to know that it really, really sucks.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

This is most definitely the case with me. I’m not afraid of being poor³, but I am absolutely terrified of being a failure.

You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success.

This is exactly the way I’m wired. I play to win, but I also play not to lose. Even when playing basement cricket with my brother, I usually play low risk low reward shots instead of high risk high reward ones.

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.

This is what really scares me. The only major failure I’ve had thus far that really hurt was scoring 12/50 on a Chemistry test in high school. I had dreaded that day (having to go home and say “Amma, I failed”) all my school life, and it still stings. This makes me ask myself: am I failing by setting the bar too low?

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.

I’ve heard a lot of people say this. I like to think I know what I am and am not capable of. Maybe I do need to fail spectacularly to figure this out.

I think I need to be less afraid of failure, and start playing to win as opposed to playing not to lose. But, I still don’t think it’s “ok” to fail. It’s not. Failure sucks, and it should. It should hurt. Otherwise, you’re just going to keep failing and will never learn anything from your failures.