The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
Delivered at Harvard University's commencement ceremony on June 5, 2008, exploring how rock-bottom failure liberated her to create and how empathy expands human purpose.
Full Transcript
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 have experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have been worth it for losing weight!
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 learnt 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 fringe benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the importance of imagination.
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. 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.
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.
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.
Defining Key Excerpts
"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."
"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."
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