Even if you think this post doesn't apply to you, or you don't have interest in it, for what ever reason...read it anyway. It is a quote, given by Harry Potter's creator, J.K. Rowling, when she gave the commencement speech at a Harvard graduation. Her thoughts on failure and imagination are incredible- and I encourage you to google this speech and WATCH it. I say watch it because her accent and passion make each word even more powerful. I'll share with you some of the excerpt that was shown on Oprah this past week and the specific quotes that have motivated me so deeply to step beyond myself, my own fears of inadequacy, and LIVE.
"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. 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."
"I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive."
"And so rock bottom became the foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, 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 fail by default."
J.K. Rowling. http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination
So as Trenton and I were driving on a frighteningly steep mountain road this afternoon, and he was commenting on how steep the drop was just a few feet from our tires, I asked him to pull the car over instead of closing my eyes and panicking like I usually do when heights are involved. I asked him to stop the car so that I could get out and look over the edge. And so that's what we did. We stood at the edge of a 300 foot cliff for quite some time and I will tell you this...I didn't feel like life's failure in that tiny moment.
Janet
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