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Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

Browsing

I had been writing – all I ever wanted to do from – as – from the age at which you understand that books are written – they don’t just spontaneously grow out of the ground. 

J.K.Rowling is the author of the widely popular Harry Potter fantasy series, which has sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Rowling is the first self-made billionaire author in history, captivating readers in eighty languages, and two-hundred countries around the world.  

The Harry Potter Series is one of the highest-grossing movie franchises in history – raking in more than 9.1 billion dollars. She also writes crime fiction under the pen name Robert Galbraith.

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.

Rags to Riches

Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as a failure. Her marriage had failed, and she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating and allowing her to focus on writing. During this period, Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression and contemplated suicide. Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being “poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless”

J.K. Rowling first had the idea for Harry Potter while delayed on a train travelling from Manchester to London King’s Cross in 1990. Over the next five years, she began to plan out the seven books of the series. She wrote mostly in longhand and amassed a mountain of notes, many of which were on scraps of paper