College commencement speeches are meant to be inspiring, uplifting affairs that impart a few words of wisdom to graduates about to set out to make their way in the world. So among the many topics British author J.K. Rowling might have broached in her June 5th address to Harvard’s 2008 graduating class, failure was certainly an offbeat choice.

After all, what did she, the author of the wildly successful Harry Potter series, know about failure? Moreover, how could it be relevant to this particular audience of young adults, among the best and brightest of their generation?

But in her speech, titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” she told the crowd, “What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure ... And by every standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”

For all of Rowling’s success—nearly 400 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide, and her fortune is estimated at $1.1 billion—her early life and forays into fiction were far more modest. Her childhood dream was to write novels, but her parents, who came from underprivileged backgrounds, worried she would never survive and encouraged her to do something technical or otherwise financially practical. She compromised by studying classics in college and afterward worked as a researcher for Amnesty International. But it wasn’t until she found herself as a young divorcee living on state benefits that she hit, as she said, “rock bottom.”

“I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless,” Rowling told the crowd of soon-to-be Harvard alumni. But it was during this dark time that she was able to reach for her goal of writing fiction because, in her mind, she had nothing left to lose.

“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.”

Her failure, in fact, ended up as the catalyst for her tremendous success. “The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive,” she said in her speech. “You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”

Sounds a bit depressing and, to be honest, not much fun. After all, failure isn’t one of the things most college graduates look forward to putting on their CVs. In fact, failing is an experience most people go out of their way to avoid, rather than embrace.

Of course, failure isn’t an experience to be deliberately sought, and cushioning ourselves against its harshest blows makes perfect sense. But failure isn’t something to be despised or ashamed of, either. As J.K. Rowling went on to say in her speech,

“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.”

Failure may feel horrible, but it can actually be good for you.

The stories of the world’s most successful failures suggest that what matters most is not whether you win or lose, but how you fail.

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