What did JK Rowling learn from failure?

JK Rowling grew up in a family where her vivid imagination was regarded as a lovable foible, but not something that should be relied upon to pay the bills. At 21, she faced a crossroads: pursue her ambitions as a writer or please her parents by building a reliable career.

She tried to find some middle ground by studying classics, but seven years after graduation, Rowling was a single parent with no job and no money. Not only had her parents’ fears come true, but so had her own. She considered herself a failure in every sense.

Yet seeing her worst fear come true had a surprising effect: “Rock bottom” became the perfect opportunity to start over and begin again.

There’s a time limit on holding your parents responsible for the direction you’ve taken in life. Once you’re old enough to make decisions of your own, the responsibility is yours and yours alone.

As dark as this time in Rowling’s life was, failure taught her lessons that she wouldn’t have learned otherwise: that she had a strong will to survive, even more discipline than she realized, and invaluable friendships worth cherishing.

You can never really know yourself until you’ve faced true adversity. It helped Rowling eliminate everything that wasn’t important in her life, forcing her to focus on the only work that mattered to her: writing a book about a wizard called Harry Potter.

If she had succeeded at anything else in her life, she may never have discovered the resolve and inspiration to persist in the one area she felt a calling for. In that sense, realizing that her greatest fear had come true is what set Rowling free.

Life cannot be lived by avoiding failure. Setbacks and disasters are inevitable. But the experience of surviving them will give you an inner strength that no exam result can.

And without those experiences of failure, without the mindset they inspired, there would be no Harry Potter.

But we don’t need to conjure magic to make a difference. It was Plutarch, the ancient Greek philosopher, who said: what we accomplish on the inside can change the reality outside. That remains true today. We all have the power to imagine better, no matter what life throws at us.