Below is the speech given to the graduating class at Harvard by J.D.Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. She talks about failure motivating her to suceed, at around age 30. What she doesn't mention, and may not know, is that this happens around her 1st Saturn Return.
she is another walking layperson  poster child of the efficacy of astrology. We astrologers expect lives to fall apart if need be and reformulate on your own path and destiny at that age. I enjoy it when a lay person gives a testimony that matches what we would say! Since I am on my 2nd Saturn Return, I am experiencing some new failures and the fruits of some of my successes...


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
largest Gryffindor reunion.
 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 delights of becoming a gay wizard. 
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 crucial importance
of imagination. 
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 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.
 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 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. 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 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, 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, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its
arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that
enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never
shared.
 One of the greatest formative experiences of my life
preceded Harry 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 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty
International’s headquarters in London. 
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled
letters 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, eye-witness accounts of
summary trials and executions, of 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
had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices
included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had
happened to those they had left behind.
 I shall never 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, 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 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 own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized
and executed.
 Every day of my working week in my early 20s 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
were the rights of everyone. 
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils
humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I
began to have nightmares, literal 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 mobilises 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 in that process was one of the most humbling
and inspiring experiences of my life.
 Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans 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 sympathise. 
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at
all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own
experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other
than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can
close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them
personally; they can refuse to know.
 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 agoraphobia, and
that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more
monsters. They are often more afraid. 
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable
real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil 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. 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, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and
unique 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. 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 change the 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. 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 trouble, people who have
been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death 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. 
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.
I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very
much.