Text as delivered.

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, in a higher place all, graduates.

The starting time matter I would like to say is 'thank yous.' Not only has Harvard given me an boggling 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 have deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world'due south largest Gryffindor reunion.

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Delivering a commencement address is a slap-up responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my listen dorsum to my own graduation. The first speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because information technology turns out that I can't remember a single give-and-take she said. This liberating discovery enables me to keep without whatsoever fright that I might inadvertently influence you lot to abandon promising careers in business, the constabulary or politics for the dizzy delights of condign a gay sorcerer.

You run into? If all you think in years to come is the 'gay magician' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Doable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and centre for what I ought to say to y'all today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what of import lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with ii answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I take decided to talk to yous about the benefits of failure. And every bit 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, just please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-former that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-yr-old that she has go. 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, e'er, was to write novels. Nonetheless, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to higher, 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 language Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modernistic Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German language and scuttled off downwardly the Classics corridor.

I cannot recall telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have constitute out for the commencement 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 exercise non arraign 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 sometime enough to take the cycle, responsibleness lies with yous. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I accept since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes low; it means a one thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, just 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 academy, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too picayune time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the mensurate of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you lot are young, gifted and well-educated, yous have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never nonetheless inoculated anyone confronting 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 fright of failure quite equally much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person'due south idea of success, so high take you already flown.

Ultimately, nosotros all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to requite yous a set of criteria if you allow information technology. So I call back it fair to say that by whatsoever conventional measure, a mere vii years after my graduation twenty-four hour period, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally curt-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern United kingdom, 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 up here and tell you that failure is fun. That catamenia of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that at that place was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no thought 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? Just considering failure meant a stripping abroad 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 accept found the determination to succeed in the i arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set complimentary, because my greatest fearfulness had been realised, and I was still live, and I still had a girl whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a large idea. And then rock lesser became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You lot might never fail on the calibration I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to alive without failing at something, unless yous alive so cautiously that you might also not have lived at all – in which case, y'all fail past default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could take learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also plant 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, e'er subsequently, secure in your power to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the force of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and information technology has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

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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 accomplishment. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the 2. 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, considering of the role information technology played in rebuilding my life, simply that is not wholly and so. Though I personally volition 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 chapters to envision that which is non, 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 accept never shared.

1 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 class of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my tiffin hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research section at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little function I read hastily scribbled messages smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside earth of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Immunity past their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, heart-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 up to give information, or to try and observe out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young homo no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally sick after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video photographic camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed every bit frail every bit a child. I was given the job of escorting him dorsum to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me hereafter happiness.

And as long every bit I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and all of a sudden hearing, from behind a airtight door, a scream of hurting and horror such as I accept never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and brand a hot drink for the boyfriend 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 land with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence near the evils humankind will inflict on their young man humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And even so I also learned more near human being goodness at Immunity International than I had e'er known earlier.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who accept never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who take. The power of human empathy, leading to collective activeness, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are bodacious, join together in huge numbers to save people they do non know, and will never meet. My pocket-size participation in that process was 1 of the virtually humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike whatsoever other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can remember themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my make of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might employ such an power to dispense, or control, merely equally much equally to understand or sympathise.

And many adopt non to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their ain feel, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to take been born other than they are. They can reject to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can shut their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can reject to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not recollect they have whatsoever fewer nightmares than I exercise. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a grade of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I recollect the wilfully unimaginative run across more than monsters. They are often more agape.

What is more, those who choose not to empathize 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 cease of that Classics corridor downwardly 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 nosotros attain 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 exterior globe, the fact that we impact other people's lives simply past existing.

Merely how much more are y'all, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your chapters for hard work, the education you lot have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you lot apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The manner y'all vote, the fashion you live, the way yous protestation, the pressure you lot bring to touch on your government, has an touch way across your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to employ your status and influence to heighten your voice on behalf of those who accept no voice; if y'all cull to identify not just with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who practise not have your advantages, so it volition not only exist your proud families who gloat your being, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you accept helped change. We practise not need magic to change the world, we conduct all the power we need inside ourselves already: nosotros accept the power to imagine meliorate.

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 take 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 take been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation nosotros were spring by enormous amore, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, past the knowledge that we held sure photographic testify that would exist exceptionally valuable if whatever of u.s. ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish yous nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that fifty-fifty if you remember not a single discussion of mine, you lot remember those of Seneca, another of those former Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
Equally is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how skillful it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank-you very much.