《哈利波特》的作者J.K.羅琳女士，在出席2008年哈佛大學畢業典禮時，做了名為
《失敗的好處和想象的重要性》的演講，她在演講過程中幾乎沒有提到關於寫作《哈利波特》的事情，而是通過自己年輕時一段艱辛的日子和自己對人生的思考，告訴同學們：生活就像故事一樣，不在乎長度，而在於質量。親愛的孩子，別害怕失敗，也別喪失想象。
演講中文：
福斯特主席，哈佛公司和監察委員會的各位成員，各位老師、家長、全體畢業生們：
首先，請允許我說一聲謝謝。哈佛給予我的不僅僅是無上的榮譽，還有連日來因為一想到這個演講，帶來的恐懼以及恐懼導致的陣陣噁心讓我減肥成功。這真是一個雙贏的局面。
現在我要做的就是深呼吸，眯著眼睛看著眼前的大紅橫幅，安慰自己只是在世界上最大的矮人大會上。發表畢業演說是一個巨大的責任，我的思緒一下子回到自己的畢業典禮上。那天做報告的是英國著名的哲學家Baroness Mary Warnock，通過對她的演講的回憶對我寫今天的演講稿給予了極大地幫助。因為我不記得她說過的任何一句話了，這個發現讓我釋然，讓我不再有任何恐懼。我可能會無意中影響你，放棄在商業、法律或政治等有前途的職業而為眩暈的愉悅成為一個“快樂的魔法師”。你們都明白，如果在若干年後您還記得“快樂的魔法師”這個笑話，說明我已經超越了Baroness Mary Warnock。
可實現的目標：個人提高的第一步。其實，我為今天應該告訴你們什麼已經殫精竭慮了。我曾問自己：我從畢業到現在的這些年裡，學到和了解了什麼重要的教訓。我已想出了兩個答案。在這個美好的一天，當我們正聚集在一起慶祝您畢業的時刻，我已決定與你們談談失敗的好處，另一方面，你們站在“現實生活”的門檻上，我要歌頌至關重要的想象力。這些似乎是不切實際或似是而非的選擇，但請原諒我。讓一個已經42歲的人回顧在她21歲畢業時情景，是個讓人有點不舒服的經歷。
失敗的好處
可以說，我人生的前一部分，一直掙扎在自己的雄心和身邊的人對我的期望兩者之間取得平衡。我一直深信我唯一想做的事——寫小說。不過，我的父母兩人都來自貧窮的背景，而且沒有任何一人上過大學。他們都堅持認為我過度的想象力是一個令人驚訝的個人怪癖，絕不可支付按揭或保證安穩的退休金。他們希望我拿到一個職業學位。可我想學習英語文學。最終達成了一個折衷的意見，現在想起來仍不令人滿意，最終，我去學習現代語言。幾乎剛把車停在路盡頭的牆角，我放棄了德語並逃到古典文學的殿堂。我不記得是否告訴我的父母我是學習古典文學的。也許他們很可能在我畢業那天才第一次發現我的專業是什麼。在這個星球上的所有科目裡，我想他們會認為再沒有比希臘神話學更糟糕的了。
我想澄清一下：我不會因為他們的觀點而責怪我的父母。埋怨父母給你指錯方向是有時間段的。當你長到自己可以掌握方向時，你就要自己承擔責任了。尤其是，我不會因為自己希望不要經歷貧窮而責怪我的父母。他們是貧窮的，我也一直很貧窮。貧困帶來的恐懼，壓力有時是絕望，這意味著屈辱和苦難。用您自己的努力擺脫貧困這確實是一件對自己而言驕傲的事情。但貧窮本身只有對傻瓜而言才是浪漫的。
我在你們這個年齡時，最害怕的不是貧窮，而是失敗。像你們這樣大時，我明顯缺乏在大學學習的動力。我花了太久在咖啡吧寫故事，而在課堂的時間就很少了。我有一個通過考試的訣竅，並且數年間一直認為我的生活在我的同齡人中是成功的，現在，我不愚蠢地假設因為你們的年輕、天才和受過良好教育就從來沒有困難或心碎的時刻。
才華和智商從來不會對命運的反覆無常有所準備。我也不會假設大家都坐這裡冷靜地滿足於自身的優越感。但從哈佛畢業的事實表明，你們對失敗不熟悉。害怕失敗像渴望成功一樣強烈。事實上，您對失敗的理解可能和普通人對成功的看法不會太遠。因為你們已經站在如此之高的位置。最終，我們所有人都必須自己決定什麼構成失敗，但如果你願意，世界是相當渴望給你一套標準的。
因而我可以公平地講，從任何傳統的標準看，在我畢業僅僅七年後的日子裡，我的失敗就達到了空前的規模：一個異常短暫的破裂的婚姻、失業、一個單親家長，像在現代英國的窮人一樣，只是還沒有到無家可歸的地步罷了。眼前時刻浮現著父母和自己對未來的擔心。按照慣常的標準來看，我是我所見過的最大的失敗者。現在，我不打算站在這裡告訴你失敗是好玩的，我的那段生活經歷是困窘不堪的；我更不知道新聞媒體所說的童話故事般的革命；我也不知道那種困苦要持續多久；在相當長的一段時間裡，任何盡頭的光明都只是一個希望而不是現實。
那麼，為什麼我要談論失敗的好處呢？只是因為失敗剝去了你不需要的東西。我不再偽裝自己，而是直接把所有精力放在對我最重要的工作上。如果我已經在其他領域成功了，我可能絕不會再有機會找到在真正屬於自己的舞臺上取得成功的決心。我重新獲得了自由，因為我最害怕的已經發生了，但我還活著，我還有一個我深愛著的女兒，還有一箇舊打字機和一個大創意（指寫“哈利波特”）。
所以，困境的谷底成為我重建生活的堅實基礎。你可能永遠不會有我這種失敗的經歷，但有些失敗，在生活中是不可避免的。毫無挫折的生活是不存在，除非你生活的萬般小心，可有些失敗還是會發生。失敗讓我內心安全，是我從通過考試中沒有得到過的。失敗教會我一些不能用其他方法獲得的東西，我發現自己有堅強的意志，比想象中還多的原則，我也發現我擁有朋友——他們的價值遠在紅寶石之上。從挫折中得到知識將使你更加明智和堅強，也就是說您比以往任何時候更有能力生存。你從來沒有真正認識自己，或通過逆境的檢驗認識到您的朋友的力量，直到兩者經受逆境的考驗。對所有人而言，這種認知是一個真正的禮物。這是痛苦的勝利比我取得的任何資格有著更高的價值。
給我一部時間機器，我會告訴21歲的自己：個人的幸福在於明白生活並不是看你的所得或成就。你的資歷、簡歷，都不是你的生活，雖然你會遇到很多和我同齡或者更老一點的人依然混淆兩者。生活是困難的，複雜的，超出任何人的控制。謙恭地認識到這一點將使你歷經滄桑後能夠更好的生存。
想象力的重要性
我的第二個主題：想象力的重要性，因為這是重建我生活的一部分。想象力不僅是人類獨具能力，設想還不存在的事物是所有發明和創新的源泉。這種改造和揭露的能力，使我們能夠對自己未經歷的苦難者產生同理心。
在我20多歲時，儘管我可以在午餐時間裡悄悄寫故事，可為了付房租，我做的主要工作是在倫敦總部的大赦國際研究部門。在我的小辦公室，我看到了人們在匆忙中寫的信，這些信是從極權主義政權那裡偷運出來的。那些人冒著被監禁的危險，告知外面的世界他們那裡正在發生的事情。我看到那些無跡可尋的人的照片——由他們的家人和朋友鋌而走險地送到大赦國際來的。我看過拷問受害者的證詞和被害的照片，我也讀過筆跡、目擊證人的供詞以及即決審判和處決的罪犯的檔案。我有很多的合作者是前政治犯，他們已離開家園流離失所，或逃亡流放，因為他們大膽地懷疑政府的民主問題。來我們辦公室的訪客有告密者以及想了解迫害真相的人。
我永遠不會忘記：一個非洲酷刑的受害者——一名當時比我還小的年輕男子，他因在故鄉的悲慘經歷導致精神錯亂。當他在攝像機前講述被殘暴的摧殘的時候，他顫抖失控。他比我稍高一點，但當時看來卻像個脆弱的孩童。後來，我被安排護送他到地鐵站，這名生活已被殘酷地打亂的男子，小心翼翼地握著我的手，祝我未來生活幸福!
不同於這個星球上的任何其他生物，人類可以學習理解未經歷過的東西。他們可以設身處地為別人著想當然，這是一種能力就像我虛構的魔法世界一樣。這在道德上也是中立的。一個人可能會利用這種能力去操縱、或控制，但也有很多人選擇去了解或同情。
很多人一點也不喜歡鍛鍊自己的想象力，他們選擇待在舒適的生活範圍內，從來不麻煩地去想想如果自己出生在別處一切會怎樣。他們拒絕聽到尖叫聲或向籠子裡窺視，他們可以封閉自己的內心。只要痛苦不觸及他們個人，他們可以拒絕去了解。我可能會因誘惑而嫉妒那樣生活的人，除了我不認為他們會比我少做噩夢。選擇住在狹窄的空間可導致某種形式的精神廣場恐懼症，並給自己帶來恐懼感。我認為不想看到更多怪物的人，他們常常更害怕。更甚的是，那些選擇不同情的人可能激活真正的怪獸，因為我們自己沒有嚴懲邪惡，冷漠與無視卻讓我們犯下了邪惡的共謀罪。
在21歲時，我從古典文學中學到很多知識。其中之一我所不明白的是，希臘作家普魯塔克所說的：我們內心的實現將改變外在現實。那是一個多麼驚人的論斷，並在我們生活的每天被無數次論證。這在某種程度上表明，我們與外部世界有逃不掉的瓜葛。事實上，我們以自己的存在來接觸其他人的生命。
但哈佛大學2008屆的畢業生們，你們中的多少人會去觸及他人的生命呢？你們的智慧、努力工作的能力以及所受的教育將給予你們獨特的地位和責任。即使您的國籍把你與別人分開了，你們絕大部份仍屬於世界上僅存的超級大國。你們表決的方式，你們生活的方式，你們抗議的方式，你們給自己的政府帶來的壓力，其影響力將超越你們的國界，這是你們的特權，也是你們的負擔。
如果您選擇使用您的地位和影響力去代表那些沒有發言權的人發出聲音；如果您不僅去幫助強者，而且還會同情並幫扶弱者；如果你會設身處地為不如你的人著想，那麼，您的存在將不僅是你家族的驕傲，也是無數因你幫助而過上幸福生活的人的驕傲。我們不需要魔法來改變世界，我們自身已經擁有了需要的所有力量：我們有能力更好地想象。
我的演講也接近尾聲了。對你們，我有最後一個希望，也是我在21歲時就一直在思考的。畢業那天坐在我身邊的朋友將是我終身的朋友。他們是我的孩子的教父母，是我在遇到麻煩時可以求助的人，是當我用他們的姓名作為食死徒的名字時而不會起訴我的朋友（譯者注：食死徒是哈利波特中的人物）。
在我們畢業的時候，我們因無盡的愛而在此相聚。我們有共同的永不再有的經歷。當然，如果我們中的任何人競選首相，那麼今天的照片將是極為寶貴的證明。所以，今天我可以給你們的，沒有比同伴的友誼更好的祝福了。
明天，我希望你們即使記不得我的名字，你還記得那些塞內加，他是我在羅馬文學著作中結識的另一位哲學家，幫助我在我失去工作之時，尋找到古老的生活智慧：
生活就像故事一樣，不在乎長度，而在於質量。這才是問題的關鍵。
我在此祝大家生活愉快！非常感謝!
英文原文：
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 honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve 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 Gryffindors' 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, 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 still 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 has 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 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 could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
I know the irony strikes like with the force of a cartoon anvil now, but…
They had 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 heartache. 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 academically.
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 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 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 to me 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.
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 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 think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those 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 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 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 given 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, 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 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 can lead 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 may 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 to change. We do not need magic to transform 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 real trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used 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 can 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.
