#32 J.K. Rowling: The Benefits of Failure

I have racked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this. I've come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the real Benefits of Failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called real life, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself and what those closest to me expected of me. I was convinced that the only thing— the only thing I wanted to do ever was write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that never could pay a mortgage or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil now. I would like to make it clear in parentheses that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiration date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty but failure. Ultimately, we have all— we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. But the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it is fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere 7 years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it could possibly be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears that my parents had for me, that I had for myself, had both come to pass. And by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. Now I'm going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. I just read a portion of Very Good Lives by J.K. Rowling, uh, Rowling, and, um, it's the fringe benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. And it's a really good book. Um, it's super short, around 70-ish pages. Most of its illustrations— I think I read it in like 30 minutes. I want to make a quick episode on it today because it is truly an amazing book. Um, she did really, really well in her speech, and she said it— there's a lot of quote— like quotable moments within it, and it also like chronicles her um, just like a quick story of her life. There's not really a lot of biographies on her, so this was kind of a— the closest book I could get to like a, a self-biography book-ish. So, um, this is a very good book. Um, and basically J.K. Rowling, she was delivering a commencement address at Harvard University, and she was speaking to the graduating class about two topics. And this book is really about Failure and Imagination. And there's just so many good quotes within it, and it's a really good book. I recommend buying it. Um, it's super cheap too. I think it's like $10. Um, but anyways, it's a really good book, and I really want to just go through kind of what I read in the beginning. I have, uh, kind of quotes like failure, um, quotes about failure, success, adversity, self-knowledge, imagination, empathy, all these different things. Um, but I really want to just go through what I read again, um, and not just read it, but I want to actually go through just certain parts. So she grew up, um, very poor. She grew up in this environment that was not really supportive. When you think about it, she was talking about her parents, right? Her parents came from this poor background. She was super poor and they wanted her to just be, um, secure. They never went to college. And she had this over— she had this overactive imagination and they thought it would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension. I actually looked it up. She's the richest author in the world. She is the richest author by far. So she has sold, I think, over 600 million copies of the Harry Potter series, which is second, I believe, behind the Bible, which is insane. And I love that she says, I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil down. So you have that, um, but again, she says, I can't criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. And the thing that, like, I want to highlight is she says, what I feared most for myself at your age— so she's talking to these Harvard graduates— what I feared for myself at your age was not poverty but failure. And the thing is, she, she goes in like into this whole thing. She failed tremendously. She had a, um, she had a marriage that basically imploded. She was a lone parent. She was jobless. She was almost as poor as it could be before being homeless in Britain. And everything that she had warned herself of, or she thought of herself, of, um, it came to pass basically. So, but, but what is the twist in this? The twist is that she's— she says, I'm going, um, I'm going to stand here, or she says, I'm not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. Um, and it— and the thing is, there are times in your life where it is very dark. There's the storms and the trials, um, and all these things that come. There's a lot of pain, right? But the thing is, there's a lot of moments, right, where you have this idea and you're going to sometimes go through extreme circumstances to get to it. And that's what taking risks is all about. To take a risk is to really just put yourself out there like you have nothing to lose. And sometimes you do have something to lose. Like, I think of the Creed movies where Creed or Adonis or whatever his name is, he's basically going out and he has something to lose. And that's what Rocky is reminding him of. Like, you have something to lose. These other guys don't. And the thing is, if you have something to lose or even if you don't, you're going to go through hard times and you can choose. You can go through harder times or less harder times, but everyone goes through tough trials. So it is really interesting. I think I messed it up in the beginning when I said I'm not going— I said I'm going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. I messed that up and said I'm not going to stand here. But it's just an important note that you're going to have those hard times, right? And the thing is, don't fear poverty, but fear failure and try to be ambitious. And the thing is, I would almost say don't fear failure because there are a lot of— failure is kind of the biggest, um, it's the biggest withdraw— withdrawal for people because they go into a job, they go into something where they just want to take a lot of risks, right? And then all of a sudden they have this like fear of like not doing well, or they have this fear of like, like a lot of pressure building up. And fear can almost paralyze people to the point where they don't actually take any more risks. And that's something that's really interesting. And it sounds like J.K. Rowling really got outside of herself here, um, with the failure part. But it is really interesting. She, she talks a lot about failure and imagination. So I really want to go into those quotes. So just a reminder, She says, ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. The world— I'm just to reflect on this quote— the world is always pushing in around you. It's always telling you to be something, to do something. You got to do this, you got to do that. Um, peer pressure is a form of that, right? And there's all these different forms and facets of the world trying to push you in. And like she said, the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. The thing is, you need to determine, all right, I cannot be doing this in my life, this would be considered failure. And then now let's aim for success. And that's why we read biographies, that's why I read books like this, because one, you get to experience the good part of someone's life So they could be really messed up, but they might have some really good themes or something in their life that they were really, really good at. And so we take the essence from that and we take what we've learned from that and apply it to our own lives. That's why I'm distilling this information from the 70-page book into probably a 20-30 minute podcast episode for you guys. And so the interesting thing about this is like this whole idea of failure, um, the benefits of failure. So this is one of her quotes. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I feel like that's a really good business principle, right? Failure means the stripping away of anything inessential. And this is like Elon Musk where he talks about delete, delete, delete. There's all these ideas of to get to the essence of something, the form of something, you have to strip away all the bloat or the things surrounding it and get straight to the essence of it. You need to strip away the inessential. And failure, failure meant a stripping away, a stripping away of the inessential. Now, this is really interesting because every time you fail, right, Every time, so Elon would send— I actually think this is a good definition of failure, but I also think it's a positive one. I think people think of failure as a bad thing, and I actually think it's the opposite. Because you look at people like Elon Musk, you look at all these people, let's take Elon Musk as an example. He sends out rockets, right? He was— he sent out 2 rockets, they both blew up. He sent out a third rocket and it either succeeded or it failed. I can't remember which one. But basically every time he failed in the sense it stripped away the inessential to get more to the essence in order to make it more successful. And the thing is, if you fail faster, you're going to succeed faster. So if you fail more, if you're going at like the speed of light and you're failing more and more than all these other companies or all these other people, You have more experience inherently over these people because they're cautious. They, they don't want to fail. And because failing more means to learn more, that's the thing. That's the catch of failing, right? The catch is you're learning more and learning more means you have more experience. More experience means that you're actually outperforming people if you're failing in the right way and you're learning from it. People have this like adverse risk where they don't want to take risks. They don't— the moment someone fails once, they don't want to do it again. And if you have an environment where that's not really encouraged to fail, you're not going to get that far. Because if you do have an environment where you can fail many, many times and you're trying to be better, you're always— the thing is, the world is not perfect. The world is not going to— you're not going to just get everything right and you can try.. But it's better to just fail, fail hard, fail fast, fail quicker than anyone else, and then pick up, pick up your feet and go and do it again and do it again and do it again. The thing is, you want to keep failing because the faster you fail, the more you learn, the more experience you're gaining over everyone that doesn't want to fail. So I love this idea simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I would almost call that success. Success means stripping away the inessential. You're stripping away the things that don't matter, right? And she said, 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 one arena where I truly, or where I believed I truly belonged. So the idea, I think she's talking about Harry Potter in this quote, but it's really interesting because she's fine. She says find that one thing, find that one area where you really think you're going to do well, or where you truly, um, I just read, I think I'm like 50 pages into Michael Ovitz's book. Um, he's the founder of CAA, which is this big, massive Hollywood agency. He works with super agents, friends of Bill Murray. He made like Bill Murray, David Letterman, all these people. But his idea is like, you should love what you do. Like the thing that he found at 18 years old was you should love what you do. And that's the basic principle of success. And what she's saying here is if you find one thing where you're really determined and you believe that you truly belong or you really love it, that will lead you to succeed in that one area or arena, as she put it. The next quote is, 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— this goes straight to the Elon Musk quote that I was talking about. Delete, delete, delete. It is impossible to live without failing at something. You cannot live— this is what we were talking about with the first quote— simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. It is impossible to live without failing at something. You're going to fail all the time. It's just going to happen. So unless you live so cautiously that you might as well— you might as well not have lived at all. Basically, she's saying that to fail is to live. If you live, you're going to fail. And the thing is, if you try to get away from the failure, in which case you fail by default, you're failing if you're trying to get away from failure. It's a cool reverse psychology of the term failure, and it's really interesting. And she says, failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. She's also saying that you learn more when you fail more. You, you're learning things that only failure could have taught you, right? By reading these books, I'm able to see the failure of others. I can see, oh, I shouldn't do that because this is what happened to this other person. This is what happened when you do this, or when you're unfaithful, or, um, you, you do the wrong business move. There's so many different things that could happen. And so in a way, I'm learning about failure through these books, but then there's also going to be in like personal life failure and experience. So there's like two-faceted approaches, and this goes back to like reading, right? If you read about people and you read about what they're doing, you can take these good ideas like I found in her book, right? And you stay away from— all right, you know, she had a marriage that imploded, um, she was, you know, poor, she— like all these different things you can find what made her successful and read about those and say, all right, I want to be like that. I don't want to be like this certain thing that she had. And you can kind of pick and choose in a way because reading books opens your eyes to a whole nother world that's out there, right? This is something that— it's the C.S. Lewis idea of reading, right? Reading transports you. Um, it— yeah, it transports you into this other world. You're seeing it through someone else's eyes. And you basically— one man can see 10,000 per— like, 10,000 people, um, he can see each one of theirs, uh, just all their perspectives, right? You can see 10,000 people's perspectives within just like a book, right? Or 10,000 books, however many books it takes. And not only is it the author, but the people you're reading about as well. So you're seeing like, what does the author want to tell me? What does this person's life wants to tell me. Even in fiction books or other books, right, you have all these things where you're talking about the idea of like, you know, hypotheticals of like what different stereotypes of people are, right? So it's really interesting. And J.K. Rowling— this is a really great book. So now we go into this idea of adversity and self-knowledge. She says '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've ever earned.' She's saying in this quote that you will never truly know yourself or your friends around you until you've been put through adversity, and This shows a lot about people. There's songs that I listen to, I feel like it's almost every song, where a lot of these rap songs, they talk about, you know, achieving success and no one really believed in, believed in them in the beginning, right? They were a no-name, no one really believed in them. And then now that they have success, everyone wants to be their friend. And this is the idea of if you start from the bottom and you have friends and they've been with you no matter what your decisions are, no matter what you've done, and then you achieve success, that is a true friend. That is something that, you know, she says, such knowledge is a true gift for all that it is painfully won, and it's been worth more than any qualification I've ever earned. She's saying that relationships, relationships are one of the most important things that you can truly identify in your life, and they have to be tested by adversity. They do thick and thin. Right. And it's a really good way of showing who are your true friends. And the thing is, Chris Williamson, I've talked about this before, but I like this idea from Chris Williamson on this idea of the lonely chapter. So you have friends, right? And you're in this kind of sphere. You have friends and then you start getting better, you start self-improving, or you're getting a little bit more successful or things like that. And then you start kind of graduating from this tier of previous friends. And you're kind of in this lonely chapter where you don't have really, really good friends. You don't really want to go back down because that would be you kind of, you'd be getting worse in a sense, not worse. It sounds weird when you put it like that, but you're trying to elevate yourself, right? And you're trying to get better. And the people that were your previous friends, you've kind of outgrown. And so you're trying to look for that next group of friends, but you're in this lonely chapter where it could take like 5 years to find one good faithful friend. And there's this whole idea, and I really like that idea because I think that's what J.K. Rowling is saying here, right? So the next quote, "The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive." This idea is that you can, you are wiser and stronger from setbacks. This is the idea of failure. Every time you fail, you are becoming wiser and stronger through reading books, through actually experiencing it in real life. Any circumstance, if you're experiencing that, you're emerging wiser and stronger from setbacks through this failure, through everything. Now, we've kind of talked about one idea, right? And that's the idea of failure. But now we're going to move into imagination. And this was the second idea that she really talked about. So imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation, it is arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity. It is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. So there's kind of a lot in that quote to unpack, but I want to take the last line. It is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. The idea of imagination is, like she says, uniquely human. And she has done this really, really well in her books, right? In Harry Potter, I've read the whole series, I think, like 2 or 3 times. Which they're huge books, but they're really good. And the idea of like these fiction books or being able to write about this whole world outside— she's one of the best-selling authors of all time. You look at this, best-selling author and richest author ever. I think she's worth $1.2 to $2 billion, which is insane. It's the most any author's ever worth. But when you look at all this, right, the interesting thing is that she's saying it is the power— so it's a uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not. So you're imagining something out of nothing. It's all in your brain, right? And it is invention and innovation. And then it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. So you're empathizing with humans whose experiences you have never shared and somehow you're able to imagine this whole world. So with J.K. Rowling, she imagined the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. She imagined it. They made movies, super successful, billions and billions of dollars worth of, um, of an industry basically. And you have this idea that it is a uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not. So she's imagining out of nothing, and therefore the fount of all innovation. She's innovating she's inventing. And then she's able to empathize with other people because people see themselves within the story, or they like the story, they like the idea of it. And she's able— everyone's able to empathize with other people just on this one shared experience who you— whom you've never shared before. And it's a really interesting idea. And she says, unlike any other creature on this planet, Human beings can learn and understand without having experience. They can think themselves into other people's places. And this goes into the Harry Potter thing, right? You can understand, you can learn and understand words on a paper, right? A book is just like, it's a tree and the paper comes from a tree and like you have all these things, right? But the fact that words can go on a paper and you can understand a whole story like your life or anything or someone else's life is truly magic. It's truly this otherworldly experience. Like, books are not something to like take for granted. These are magical and not magical in the like weird sense, but just like the idea of a book is a miracle. Like, the spoken word was able to be written down and put on a piece of paper And we've done this for centuries and thousands of years. And so you have this, and she's saying human beings can learn and understand, understand without having experience. Like, I'm reading all these biographies, I'm learning and understanding through podcast episodes, I'm learning, understanding through books about these entrepreneurs and founders who are telling you their life experiences, and you're not experiencing it at all, but you're learning about it. And She says they can think themselves into other people's places. You can almost picture yourself in the story. And it's a really interesting idea because even in books, when you're reading a book like Harry Potter, you can picture yourself within the story, within the place. And it truly is— it's amazing. It's something that people don't know. Like, a story is a miracle, essentially. It's words on paper that can transform, like you can be put into someone else's place. She says, many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain relaxed within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. The interesting thing about this quote is She's describing stories, imagination, um, very— every time she's mentioning imagination, I'm thinking this is definitely referring to her stories or just stories in general. She's saying that, you know, many prefer not to exercise their imagination. They choose to remain within the bounds of their own experience. And this is what C.S. Lewis was saying, right? When you remain in the bounds of your own experience, you're not becoming wiser, you're not becoming smarter. You're not learning from other people's setbacks. You're never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born elsewhere. Like, if you're not learning about history, you're not learning about certain places or people and their experiences. You're— you don't have curiosity. The key thing behind this is curiosity. And I put a note here: this is the mindset of mediocrity. You know, you start getting complacent with the life you have and you start like not reading about these people or imagining the lives of others. So you're getting complacent. And again, this is the mindset of mediocrity. Curiosity is the key to success. Just being curious. Why do things work the way they work? Why did someone do it the way they did it, right? There's all these different questions you can ask and There's so many good things with curiosity, and you can be naturally curious. You can also just be— you can teach yourself to be curious. And even if you're not inherently curious, be curious around about the people around you. Start with the little things. Start with the things that make you curious, or start with the things that it is easy to be curious about. Now, I want to close with a couple quotes that were in this, um, story. And she has a quote from Plutarch who says, what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. And this is the same idea with Steve Jobs, right, who says like basically to the effect of we want to make a dent in the world, right? So what you do inwardly and what you achieve inwardly, even if that, you know, You know, even if you have— it's— there's an idea from Charlie Munger about outer scorecard and inner scorecard. Inner scorecard is what you hold yourself to. Like, I cannot accept below this standard and I will push myself to do this. And then you have this outer scorecard where people are telling me to do certain things. It's the whole idea of the world pushing in on you and telling you the standards that they're setting, when in reality you should be setting your own standards. So if you're achieving those standards, you are going to change outer reality. And if those are amazing standards, you're going to even affect even more people. And Kobe had this great line where this reporter asked him, you know, do you ever get nervous with fans or like in their expectations of you? And he said, no one will ever beat my own expectations. And he's basically saying, I have such a high standard within myself that no one will ever beat that. Like, I will be disappointed with myself first and the most disappointed with myself rather than anyone else in the whole world. Right. And it's just a great reminder that you need to set your own inner scorecard. You need to set, you know, I will hold myself to this higher standard. And then the last closing quote is actually from Seneca, and it says, "As is a tale, so is life. Not how long it is, but how good it is. That is what matters." This is a great quote because life is not about this idea of quantity. How many years do you get out of your life? It, it's not, "I want to live to 100," or, "I want to live to 120," or, "Forever." It's How good are you spending your years? Do you have that higher, the inner scorecard that is, you know, you're not okay with mediocrity? Are you not getting complacent? Are you curious? Like, are you changing the world outside of you, right? That is what matters. It's how good your life is, not how long it is, right? And it's funny that Seneca is saying this because it says, as is a tale, like as is a story. It's not how long the story is. It's not how long, 'Cause everyone, when you think about everyone's life, they're all stories that have not been put into words yet. I mean, biographies are that idea. But if you imagine that your life is a book and you're going on to the next chapter of your life, or you're in the middle of the chapter of your life and, you know, someone is writing that or you're writing that, then the idea is that you don't want a long story that's boring. You want, a story that is good. Maybe like the idea of a story is you're going to have failure, you're gonna have setbacks. And for some reason, that's what makes a story interesting. If you never had setbacks, if you never had anything in a story that was like, oh, there's a plot twist, or oh, there's this, or oh, there's that, then at some point it's like, you know, the story is not good. You know, your life is meant to have these trials and pain and all these certain things, failure and imagination and the, like, revolutionizing the world and making the world a better place. No matter how big or small that is, right, you can still make your life interesting. And it's really interesting that Seneca is saying this. I love this quote: As is a tale, so is life. Not how long it is, but how good it is, that is what matters. So just a one-line summary of kind of the whole just, um, book would be failure means stripping away the inessential. That, that's really the key of this whole chapter and this whole idea, uh, this whole book, right? Very Good Lives by J.K. Rowling, the fringe benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. Failure means stripping away the inessential. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode. Please buy the book. The sales of this book actually benefit a charity, which is great. And J.K. Rowling has this charity called the Lumos Charity. So every sale of this book helps the charity. It also helps us— just supports the podcast every time you buy a book at no, no additional cost to you. Also, link to her commencement address., from or for Harvard. Um, it was really— I, I watched about some of it, but I also read this book, which is The Harvard Address. So if you want to watch it or you want to read this book, I definitely recommend doing so. Uh, take your own notes. It's very short, 20-minute speech online, and then also the book kind of takes like 30 minutes. So really good book, um, really good everything. And next episode I'm going to be doing is probably a quote episode. I'm just going through— I think I have like 35 separate quotes that I've just compiled from podcast episodes or all these different places that I've learned, and I really want to share that with you guys. So thank you guys for listening to this episode, and I love learning. And J.K. Rowling, I really want to learn about her because I heard this story that she was, you know, jobless and she was a single parent and she had a terrible life, and then she wrote Harry Potter and people rejected it, and then she found one person and they published it, and it now is an all-time bestselling series. She's the richest author in the world, and she's had enormous success. So I think learning from her, even beyond this book, whether it's YouTube videos or whatever, I might try to do more of that, but I would really encourage reading from her, listening, anything you can get your hands on from her. So thank you guys for listening to this episode, and I'll talk to you guys again soon.