The commencement address emphasizes that true fulfillment and a meaningful life stem not from conventional success or avoiding failure, but from embracing failure as a catalyst for growth and utilizing imagination to foster empathy and positive change in the world.
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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 honor
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
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
this liberating discovery enables me to proceed
without any fear that i might inadvertently
inadvertently
influence you to abandon promising
careers in business the law or politics
you see if all you remember in years to come
come
is the gay wizard joke i've come out
achievable goals the first step to self-improvement
actually i have wrapped my mind and
heart for what i ought to say to you today
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
this
i have come up with two answers on this
wonderful day when we are gathered together
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 crucial importance
of imagination
these may seem exotic or paradoxical
choices but 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 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
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
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
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
now i would like to make it clear in parenthesis
parenthesis
that i do not blame my parents for their
point of view
there is an expiry date on blaming your
the moment you are old enough to take
the wheel responsibility lies with you
what is more i cannot criticize 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
not
an ennobling experience poverty
entails fear and stress and sometimes depression
depression
it means a thousand petty humiliations
and hardships
climbing out of poverty by your own
efforts that is something on which to
pride yourself
but poverty itself is romanticized only
by fools
what i feared most for myself at your
age was not
poverty but failure 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 in my life
and that of my peers now
i am not dull enough to suppose that
because you are young
gifted and well educated you have never
known heartbreak hardship or heartache
talent and intelligence never yet inoculated
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
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 removed 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's fair to say that by any
conventional measure
a mere seven years after my graduation day
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'm 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
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
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
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
idea
and so rock bottom became the solid foundation
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
failure gave me an inner security that i
had never attained by passing examinations
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
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
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 checklist of acquisition or achievement
achievement
your qualifications your cv are not your life
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
its vicissitudes
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 will defend
the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp
gasp
i have learned to value imagination in a
much broader sense
imagination is not only the uniquely
human capacity to envision that which is not
not
and therefore the fountain of all
invention and innovation
in its arguably most transformative and
revelatory capacity
it is the power that enables us to
empathize with humans
whose experiences we have never shared
one of the greatest formative
experiences of my life preceded harry potter
potter
though it informed much of what i
subsequently wrote in those books
this revelation came in the form of one
of my earliest day jobs
though i was sloping off to write
stories during my lunch hours
i paid the rent in my early twenties by working
working
at the african research department of
amnesty international's headquarters
in london there in my little office
i read hastily scribbled letters smuggled
smuggled
out of totalitarian regimes by men and
women who were risking
imprisonment to inform the outside world
of what was happening to them
i saw photographs of those who had
disappeared without trace
sent to amnesty by their desperate
families and friends
i read the testimony of torture victims
and saw pictures of their injuries
i opened handwritten eyewitness accounts
of summary trials and executions of kidnappings
kidnappings
and rapes many of my co-workers were
ex-political prisoners people who had
been displaced from their homes or fled
into exile
because they have the temerity to speak
against their governments
visitors to our offices included those
who have who had come to give
information or to try and find out what
had happened to those who
they had left behind i shall never forget
forget
the african torture victim a young man
no older than i was at the time
who had become mentally ill after all he
had endured in his homeland
he trembled uncontrollably as he spoke
into a video camera
about the brutality inflicted upon him
he was a foot taller than i was and
seemed as fragile as a child
i was given the job of escorting him
back to the underground station afterwards
afterwards
and this man whose life had been
shattered by cruelty
took my hand with exquisite courtesy
and wished me future happiness
and as long as i live i shall remember
walking along an empty corridor
and suddenly hearing from behind a
closed door
a scream of pain and horror such as i
have never heard
since the door opened and the researcher
poked out her
out her head and told me to run and make
a hot drink
for the young man sitting with her
she had just had to give him the news
that in retaliation for his
outspokenness against his country's regime
regime
every day of my working week in my early twenties
twenties
i was reminded how incredibly fortunate
i was
to live in a country with a
democratically elected government
where legal representation and a public trial
trial
were the rights of everyone every day
i saw more evidence about the evils
humankind will inflict on their fellow humans
humans
to gain or maintain power
i began to have nightmares literal nightmares
nightmares
about some of the things i saw heard
and read and yet
i also learned more about human goodness
at amnesty international than i had ever
known before
amnesty mobilizes thousands of people
who have never been tortured or
imprisoned for their beliefs
to act on behalf of those who have
the power of human empathy leading to
collective action
saves lives and frees prisoners
ordinary people whose personal
well-being and security are assured
join together in huge numbers to save
people they do not know
and will never meet my small participation
participation
in that process was one of the most
humbling and inspiring experiences of my life
unlike any other creature on this planet
human beings can learn and understand
without having experienced they can
think themselves
into other people's places
of course this is a power like my brand
of fictional magic
that is morally neutral one might use
such an ability
to manipulate or control just as much
as to understand or sympathize
and many prefer not to exercise their imaginations
imaginations
at all they choose to remain comfortably
within the bounds of their own experience
experience
never troubling to wonder how it would
feel to have been born other than they are
are
they can refuse to hear screams or peer
inside cages
they can close their minds and hearts to
any suffering that does not touch them personally
personally
i might be tempted to envy people who
can live that way
except that i do not think they have any
fewer nightmares than i do
choosing to live in narrow spaces leads
to a form of mental
agrophobia and that brings its own terrors
terrors
i think the willfully unimaginative see
more monsters
they are often more afraid
what is more those who choose not to empathize
empathize
enable real monsters for without ever
committing an act of outright evil ourselves
ourselves
we collude with it through our own apathy
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
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 harvard
graduates of 2008
likely to touch other people's lives
your intelligence your capacity for hard work
work
the education you have earned and received
received
give you unique unique status and unique responsibilities
responsibilities
even your nationality sets you apart
the great majority of you belong to the
world's only remaining superpower
the way you vote the way you live the
way you protest
the pressure you bring to bear on your
government has an impact way beyond your borders
borders
that is your privilege and your burden
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
world
we carry all the power we need inside
ourselves already
we have the power to imagine better
i am nearly finished i have one last
hope for you
which is something that i already had at 21
21
the friends with whom i sat on
graduation day have been my friends for life
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
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
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
from career ladders in search of ancient wisdom
wisdom
as is a tale so is life
not how long it is but how good it is
is what matters i wish you all very good lives
lives
thank you very much [Music]
[Music] you
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