J. K. Rowling spins a different kind of magic

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began directing all my energy into the only work that mattered to me. Had I already succeeded in anything else, I would have never 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, I had a daughter who I adored, I had an old typewriter, and a big idea, and so, rock bottom became the foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

– J. K. Rowling choses to talk about the benefits of failure and the power of imagination in her commencement speech at Harvard.

In part two of the video, she describes the power imagination in a way very different from what you would expect from the creator of Harry Potter.

“I have learnt to value imagination is a different way…it is the power that enables us to emphathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared”. She then goes on to talk about the formative experiences in her day job preceding her writing of the very first Harry Potter book.