J.K. Rowling was stuck on a delayed train in 1990 without a pen, so she imagined a story instead. That boredom became Harry Potter. The speaker uses her story to pitch a book about turning bad luck into creative breakthroughs.
In 1990, a young woman called J.K. Rowling was on a train journey from Manchester to London. The train was delayed for 4 hours. Most of us would think that's a very unfortunate experience, a real piece of bad luck. She didn't have a pen, she couldn't make any notes, she was too shy to ask for one, so she just sat for 4 hours. And in that time, she imagined a little boy called Harry Potter, and she created the story, the characters, the whole environment in her head. She said afterwards that because she didn't have time to write anything down, her imagination could run wild. Very often, you know, when we have bad luck, we think it's terrible, it's unfortunate, but bad luck can sometimes create an opportunity that we can exploit. It's a change in circumstances that we can do something about, and it's something that I explore in this book, my new book, The Art of Unexpected Solutions. And in this book, I can tell you how you can foster the circumstances in which the unexpected can happen and you can benefit from it. I think you'll enjoy it.
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