JK Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure [aka: "I had an old typewriter"!]

This is excerpted from the wonderful speech JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, gave as her commencement address at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Assocatiion on June 5, 2008. The full text can be found here.

Rowling talks about how she had hit rock bottom--divorced, with a child, jobless, and in poverty--when she took up the work that would become the first Harry Potter book. This quote gives a good sense of her:

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

"So why do I talk abut 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 energey 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..."