Hit rock bottom? Fear not, as J.K. Rowling's transformative graduation speech reveals the unexpected benefits of failure and the unparalleled power of imagination – a theme we dissect with fervor in our latest episode. Join me on a journey through Rowling's candid reflections, where I draw parallels to my own decade-long struggle to find clarity amidst life's setbacks. We unravel the tapestry of trials and triumphs, emphasizing the importance of resilience and the often-overlooked gift of empathy gained through our lowest moments.
Our discussion takes a turn towards the responsibility we hold in wielding our privilege for the greater good. Taking cues from Rowling's profound insights, we ponder the legacy we're crafting through our life's work and the dreams we chase. As we navigate this narrative, we're reminded that the pursuit of a fulfilling life isn't measured by the checklist of achievements society imposes, but by the impact we make and the quality of life we lead. Tune in for a thought-provoking session that's sure to inspire a renaissance of purpose in your own life story.
Hit rock bottom? Fear not, as J.K. Rowling's transformative graduation speech reveals the unexpected benefits of failure and the unparalleled power of imagination – a theme we dissect with fervor in our latest episode. Join me on a journey through Rowling's candid reflections, where I draw parallels to my own decade-long struggle to find clarity amidst life's setbacks. We unravel the tapestry of trials and triumphs, emphasizing the importance of resilience and the often-overlooked gift of empathy gained through our lowest moments.
Our discussion takes a turn towards the responsibility we hold in wielding our privilege for the greater good. Taking cues from Rowling's profound insights, we ponder the legacy we're crafting through our life's work and the dreams we chase. As we navigate this narrative, we're reminded that the pursuit of a fulfilling life isn't measured by the checklist of achievements society imposes, but by the impact we make and the quality of life we lead. Tune in for a thought-provoking session that's sure to inspire a renaissance of purpose in your own life story.
Hi guys, my name is Fabio from the Fabio podcast and welcome. Today we're gonna talk about a speech regarding JK Rowling. I know that some of you it doesn't really agree about. You know what JK Rowling said in the last years. I know that some of you support this and maybe other people like me try to be more reasonable and pragmatic about what she said. Even if I don't agree, the point is that she's a person who I admire because, anyway, she reached a success in a very strong way and without any help. So she did very good in my opinion, and she made this speech at our university in 2008. And let's start, let's read her speech, let's see. So she said.
Speaker 1:
Actually have wrecked my mind and heart for what I owed to say to you today. I've asked myself what I wish I'd known at my own graduation and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between the day and this. Have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day where we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I've decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure and, as you stand on the trees old, of what is sometimes called real life, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. So, as you can see, regarding you know our journey to success, all the people motivational speaker, gurus, actors or, in this case, writers well, not all the people, but you know the people who struggled and who struggled and they had a real journey to success. They always talk about the benefits of failure. How important is to fail. We live in a world where the people, the community, your family, talk to you and advise to you to be the best in this world without failing right. But the truth is that to become good in something, you have to fail, as you are a prodigy about it. But that's just, you know, one case up 10,000. So she's also say I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. So she here. She doesn't talk about a lot of attraction, I guess, but also, in this case you know, importance of imagination, vision and now, regardless about the low attraction topic, vision yourself as your future hero, is very important to reach your success. You know, she said this might seem quite exotic or paradoxical choices, but please be here with me. So coming 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.
Speaker 1:
Ago, I was striking an easy balance between the ambition I had for myself and what those closer to me expected of me. And what those closest to me expected of me. I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, if ever, was to 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 could never pay a mortgage or secure a pension. And just a small note, it's important to note that most of the times, the people around us who advise to not follow our dreams are the people who didn't pursue their dream, you know, are the people who took just the failure as the final destination. And most of the times, these people are our parents, is our family, and it's interesting you know that also JK Rowling's family or well, in this case JK Rowling's parents had, you know, the same background, a background where they led her to, maybe at the early age, to make her understand that the right way to work in this world is just with hard work and have a pension, etc. Etc. Right to reach a good, medium, average life. But evidently she didn't believe it. She was right. So I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever was to write novels. Okay, however, my parents, boba Voam, came from okay, no, we read this, sorry. So yeah, we read, we read, we read. So they had hoped that I would take a vocational degree. I wanted to study English literature. A compromise was reached that, in retrospect, satisfied nobody, and I went up to study modern language. Hardly had my parents car round the corner at the end of the road and I ditched German and the scooter off down the classics corridor. I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying classics. They might well have found out for first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
Speaker 1:
I would like to make it clear In parenthesis that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for staring you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, the responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty, had been poor themselves. And I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an unobling experience.
Speaker 1:
Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts is indeed something of which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools. What I feared most for myself at your age was no poverty but failure. At your age, in spite of a distant lack of motivation to university, where I had spent for too long in the coffee bar writing stories and far too little time at lectures, had a knuck for passing examinations and that for years had been the mixture of success in my life and that of my peers, I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the culprits of the fate, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment. However, the fact that you are graduating from our suggests that you are not very well acquainted with failure. You might be driven by fear of failure quite as much as the sigh for success, but your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success. I have you already flown academically. Ultimately, 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's fair to say that by any conventional measure. A mere seven years after my graduation day, I'd fell on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage I'd imploded and I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain Without being homeless. The fears my parents had for me and that I had for myself had both come to pass and by every user standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Speaker 1:
Just a small note it's interesting to also know a little bit about her story. There is a nice podcast. It's a short podcast and the name let's see I'm gonna set you now yeah, the witch trials of JK Rowling. So if you are going to this episodes, you are gonna understand a little bit about her story and what she went through to become successful and also the way how she approached her previous husband and how her husband was kind of violent to her and she already had a child. I see, if I'm wrong, the husband treats her like hiding her script, her Harry Potter script. So you know all these things. They leave you a mark and this mark is you can use this mark for a good thing, on your life, on your success, or maybe you can cry and I don't know says that you are a victim about it. She reacted, she went through, she escaped from that situation. So I just admire people like that, you know. So let's go forward. I mean, she escaped from her house, sorry, but she confronts the situation. So just to be clear, because if I'm wrong, the husband was so much violent and if I'm wrong, he then also the key of the first door and I don't know. As I said, it was very tough situation but she did it. So let's go forward Now.
Speaker 1:
I'm not 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 fairytale resolution, had no idea how far the tunnel extended and far a long time, and he liked the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant stripping away of the Inessential. I stopped Pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and the 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 believe it truly belonged. I was set free because my greatest fear had already been realized and I was still alive and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had the on-old type writer and a big idea. And so rock bottom became to solid foundation, which I rebuilt, my life. Here there is a nice phrase yeah, I stop pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to Direct all my energy into finishing the only work, etc. Etc. So you know this phrase and began to direct all my energy.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes we tend to do too many things, we tend to do too much and we are not really focused on something that we should do to make us happy. And if you Focus and if you direct all your energy or on just one thing per time, then you are gonna be faster to realize any goal. They're rather Spreads this energy to different. You know Goals and challenges. You know when people say it yeah, I reach success after seven years, after ten years, after 15 years. Also, myself, I start this journey More than ten years ago and I used to say to the people yeah, it took me more than ten years, etc. Etc. But I mean, in these ten years I Spread my energy to anything else. I spread my energy to different projects. I spend my energy to Looking every time for a job to maintain myself. But if you Example, if you find a job that it doesn't satisfy you, meanwhile, that is gonna take more energy from you know, from what you have to. I Mean it's gonna take you energy from from your desire Goal, okay. So this is very important the energy factor. It's very important.
Speaker 1:
You might never fail on the scale at it, but some failure in life is inevitable. 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 failed by default. Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could never Sorry 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 rubies. The knowledge that you have emerged wise and stronger from setbacks means that you are Ever after securing your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tasted 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.
Speaker 1:
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 checklist of Acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV are not your life. So you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse that you. Life is Difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control. In the humility To know that will enable you to survive. Its visis to this VCC. To this, you might think that I choose my second team, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played In repelling my life. But that is not fully so Thought. I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I've learned to value imagination in much broader sense. Imagination is not only the iniquity, human capacity to ambitions, that which is not, and therefore the fount of all Inventation and innovation in its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacities, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. One of the greatest formative experiences of my life, presitta Eripotter told it in four minutes of what Epps succinctly wrote in those books.
Speaker 1:
This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was slopping off the right stories during my lunch hours, I paid a rent in my early twenties by working in the research department of Amnesty International's Advertisers in London. There, in my little office, I read hastily scrapped letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened and written eyewitness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes. Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes or fled into exile because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
Speaker 1:
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. It was a foot taller than I was and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the underground station afterward, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy and wished me future happiness. And as long as I leave a show, remember walking alone, an empty corridor and suddenly harrying from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since the door opened and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that, in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother has been sased and executed.
Speaker 1:
Within my working week in my early twenties, I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was to live in a country with democratically elected government, where legal representation of the public trial were the rights of everyone. Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power. I began to have a nightmare a literal nightmare about some of the things I saw here and read, and yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have the power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives and frees prisoners. Every people whose personal well-being and security are assured joined together in huge numbers to save people they do not know and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Speaker 1:
Like any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand without any experience it. They can think of themselves in other people's minds, imagine themselves in other people's places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate or control just as much as to understand or sympathize, and many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to appear inside cages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any Fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think that willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters for, without ever committing an act of outright avail ourselves, we collide with it through our own apathy.
Speaker 1:
One of the many things I learned at the end of the classics corridor down which eventually, at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this written by the Greek author Plotarch what we achieve unwarredly will change other reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses in part our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's life simply by existing. So today I can wish you nothing better than similar friendship, and tomorrow I hope that, even if you remember the story of the man who was killed in the war, you will never even if you remember not a single word of mine you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I flew down the classic corridor in Richard from Carriel Ladders in search of ancient wisdom. As is the tale, so is life. Not how long it is, but how good it is is what matters. I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much. So very, very beautiful.
Speaker 1:
I loved the first part and the last part. I think the second part was very personal, but you know it can also teach something about how it works the human being mind and how much we are unvalued our life sometimes, when we just should look around to understand that we are lucky. You know only the fact that I'm recording with a mic. I have a computer. A Wi-Fi connection means I have money, I have a job to do this and you guys, you have the capacity to breathe, to listen to what I'm saying, and that's part of something very beautiful.
Speaker 1:
But we find this so discounted about it right, and we don't understand that it's not the normality. We think it's the normality, but if you go, you know, in other countries or other, if you see, if you notice a little bit, all the reality is different than ours. You can understand how much tough and hard can be their life. And I think that's what JK Rowling at the time tried to explain that we are fortunate and we have tools. So with these tools we can touch the lives around us and when we do, it's just a beautiful thing. So please reach your dreams, because you know that's what really matters. And she's right. At the end she says as a tale so it's life, not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. Right to live, a mark in this world, a positive mark, a good mark that can touch any soul. So thank you so much, guys, for being here in the Fabio Podcast journey to success and see you next time, cheers.