J.K. Rowling's Ultimate Advice For Every 20 Year Old | One of the Best Motivational Speeches Ever

[Music] given a time turner i would tell my 21 year old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist 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 [Music] life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes 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 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 one of the many things i learned at the end of that classics corridor down which i ventured at the age of 18 in search of something i could not then define was this written by the greek author plutarch what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality that is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives it expresses in part our inescapable connection with the outside world the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing but how much more are you likely to touch other people's lives your intelligence your capacity for hard work the education you have earned and received give you unique status and unique responsibilities if you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change we do not need magic to transform our world we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already we have the power to imagine better 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 off to me expected of me i was convinced that the only thing i wanted to do ever was 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 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 round of the corner at the end of the road then 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 now 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 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 where i believed i truly belonged i was set free because my greatest fear had been realized 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 on which i rebuilt my life 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 rubis 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 i have one last hope for you which is something that i already had at 21. the friends with whom i sat on graduation day have been my friends for life they are my children's godparents the people to whom i've been able to turn in times of real trouble people who have been kind enough not to sue me when i took their names for death [Music] eaters at our graduation we were bound by enormous affection by our shared experience of a time that could never come again and of course by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for prime minister [Applause] so today i wish you nothing better than similar friendships and tomorrow i hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine you remember those of seneca another of those old romans i met when i fled down the classics corridor in retreat from career ladders in search of ancient wisdom as is a tale so is life not how long it is but how good it is is what matters [Music] you

Channel: Motivation2Study

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Id: WSnUTljM6xg

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021