The Benfits of FAILURE

Originally posted on Facebook

The Benfits of FAILURE - including an excerpt from J. K. Rowling's 2008 Graduation Speech to Harvard

by Blane Mather on Friday, April 9, 2010 at 12:53pm

From J. K. Rowling's 2008 Graduation Speech to Harvard:

"I have decided to talk to you today about the benefits of failure.

A mere seven 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 is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. And so 'rock bottom' became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well have not lived at all, in which case you fail by default."

Noted Examples of Failure:

• Oprah Winfrey failed as a news reporter


• Henry Ford filed for bankruptcy 5 times


• Michael Jordan failed to make his varsity basketball team


• Winston Churchill finished last in his class


• Thomas Edison's teachers said he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first two jobs for being "non-productive." As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."


• Enrico Caruso's music teacher said he had no voice at all and could not sing.


• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas."


• Michael Caine's headmaster told him, "You will be a laborer all your life."


• Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was "sub-normal," and one of his teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams." He was expelled from school and failed the entrance exam to Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule in Zurich


• R. H. Macy failed 7 times before his store in New York City caught on.


• 27 publishers rejected Dr. Seuss's first book, "To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street".


• John Milton wrote Paradise Lost 16 years after losing his eyesight.


• Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college.


• As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall." ~ Confucius