I was stumbling though some blogs today when I came across a favorite diabetes blog that I try to read often called ride to remedy. The post she had up at the time featured her thoughts on J.K Rowling’s speech to the Harvard class of 2008. She inspired me to read the speech for myself and now I am going to share my thoughts with you.

In this speech Rowling presses the fact that failure is hard and something we do not want to do. I agree with this as my life has consisted mostly of failures and very little of success. I found myself skeptical at first when she said that there is a benefit to failure. I stopped and thought of my life for a few minutes, wondering if there were any benefits to my failures. I can think of a few one being my failure to find work or get into school when I lived in Texas. If I had I would not have been able to spend the last few years of my fathers life with him. I would not have seen my niece grow up or met the people I have met since then. So I thought okay there is a little bit of a benefit to failure. I was surprised to find as I read on that there was more.

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 to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Taken from J.K. Rowlings speech

After reading that I realized that not only would non of the events that have happened to me since my failure happened, but I would not be who I am today if I did not fail. I am a much stronger person who has done many things that I never thought I would do. For that I am thankful. Another part of this speech that caught my attention was the following stated directly after the paragraph above:

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 check-list of acquisition or achievement.

This is the hardest part for me as I always thought you had to have that check-list for your life and that it had to be done in that order. I have done nothing in the order I have thought I should do it in and I always thought that was a failure, but maybe these things have not been done or are being done later for a reason. Probably a reason I will never know.

I have found myself inspired by this speech. A good thing, but at the same time a thing I will struggle with, I have been inspired to do something I love, but I have lost my love of everything it seems. I love to write but I always get writers block when trying to write a story. Maybe again it’s being afraid of the failure that could come with it.

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