J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement

Cliff notes please? I'm not a Harry Potter fan.
 
actually... its 20 minutes you wont wish you had back... holy cripes what a powerful speaker!!
 
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans 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 leads 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 enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
 
robert l. bentham said:
actually... its 20 minutes you wont wish you had back... holy cripes what a powerful speaker!!
Click to expand...
she is just astounding. Every point she hit was Right ON!
This is such a Thoughtful person who deserves every single dime she has every earned.

and she's so right about poverty: when the going gets tough, the tough get going (as we used to say). That's when you discover those deep resources that you didn't realize were there.
of course, I've never been afraid of failure - that's what erasers are for. I got into the habit of trying, redoing, trying again until satisfied for many many years. Long before I left school and had to work in the 'real world'.

if I had a dollar for every person i saw who had a fear of failure I would be rich.

I don't remember who spoke at my Commencement but I'm going to use this one and listen to it anytime i need a jolt of greatness
 
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