The Resilient Mind - The Benefits of Failure - J.K Rowling

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

J.K. Rowling is a British author who rose to fame with her beloved Harry Potter series. Born in 1965, Rowling initially struggled as a single mother before publishing the first Harry Potter book in 1997, which went on to become a worldwide sensation.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to The Benefits of Failure with J.k.Rolling. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. There's a quotation that I almost used in the Harry Potter book. In magic, man has to rely on himself. But that's the perennial appeal of magic, the idea that we ourselves have power and we can shape our world. I came from a place where I was with a single mother

and it really was hand to mouth at one point It was as literally as poor as you can get in Britain without being homeless At one point If you've ever been there You will never ever take for granted that you don't need to worry Never I had a very very tiny baby And then I walked straight into poverty

and depression. Clinical depression is a terrible place to be because it's not sadness. Sadness is not a bad thing, you know, to cry and to feel, but it's that cold absence of feeling. It's even the absence of hope that you can feel better.

That really hollowed out feeling. That's what the dementers are. 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 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. 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 for myself, had both come to pass. And by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. 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 us 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 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. So given a time, Turner, I would tell my twilight. 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. Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes. 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, 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 connections. 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? 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. Thank you for tuning into this episode, where we're committed to empowering you with the knowledge and tools to strengthen your mind. We hope you found this episode with Joe. and rolling helpful. Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing or clicking the link

in the show notes.