Key points from J.K. Rowling speech

  • Achievable goals are the first steps to self-improvement.
  • 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.
  • Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.
  • Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.
  • Rock bottom became the solid 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.
  • 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.
  • You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.
  • Happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement.
  • Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.
  • What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
  • We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
  • As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.