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"The best presentations, the best speeches, the best advice are usually about what people learned from their failures. Steve Jobs' legendary Stanford commencement address lifted so many hearts because he talked about his failures."

Actually, I lifted large chunks of his speech to use as public speaking exercises with my advanced class in the high school last year - exceptionally inspirational words that helped my shy teenaged students speak out confidently and hopefully gave them hope.

Recently, J.K. Rowling gave a commencement speech at Harvard that also emphasized the power of failure and the importance of imagination. It is a powerfully impressive speech (watch or listen) and something that added an extra inch or 2 to my stride this morning.

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure....

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears 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 here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea 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? Simply because 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. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. 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.

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 rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or 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.

Source: KK

In other news: Last nights Photobiz was a fun event, great to catch up with photographer friends like Alfie, Ben, Thong and meet a bunch of new folk: Mark Oxley, Ryan Bruss, Will Robb, Yariv Revah from Nippon News to name but a few. Books were handed around, hands were shaken, tattoos compared.... ha, a fun, if shambolic event indeed. Looking forward to the next (better organised) one. Thanks to Jon Lynch for being so ambitious in trying to bring such a huge event together. Apparently 200 people turned up.

Oh, and I am so excited that my phone carrier, Softbank, has been chosen to carry the iphone when it launches here in Japan next month [JULY 11]. My crappy phone's been playing up a lot lately and I have been on the verge of throwing it under a frikken train going in to get a new one for a month now. Gonna wait till next month now.... Hope it survives the distance.

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