Name: 失敗的好處（ENGLISH SPEECH | JK ROWLING: The Benefits Of Failure (English Subtitles)）
Uploaded: 2022-04-12T11:50:12.000Z
Duration: 21 min 21 s
Description: 哈佛畢業典禮演講中，《哈利波特》作者 JK 羅琳向夢想家和成績優異的人提供了一些強有力的、令人振奮的建議，包括她認為“比我所獲得的任何資格都更有價值”的來之不易的一課。

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the

faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary

honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this

commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do

is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast

my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British

philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in

writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said.

This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently

influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come

out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have

asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons

I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate

your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And

as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking 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 ago, I was striking

an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected

of me. I was convinced that the only thing I wanted

to do, 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 would never pay a mortgage, or secure

a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they 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

Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched

German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have

found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the 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.

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 steering you in the wrong

direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty.

They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them

that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression;

it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your

own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised

only by fools. What I feared most for myself at your age

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent

far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had

a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success

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 caprice of the Fates, 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 Harvard suggests that you are not very

well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much

as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average

person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

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 fair to say that

by any conventional measure, 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.

The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come

to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am 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 fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended,

and for a long time, any light at 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 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.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to

succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest

fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored,

and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation

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.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure

taught me things about myself 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 the price of rubies.

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 than any qualification

I ever earned. So given 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. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet

many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated,

and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because

of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally

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失敗的好處（ENGLISH SPEECH | JK ROWLING: The Benefits Of Failure (English Subtitles)）

privilege

evidence

scale

experience