J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling children’s book series Harry Potter, knows a lot about achieving success — and failure.
“I don’t think we talk about failure enough,” Rowling told Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show. “It would’ve really helped to have someone who had had a measure of success come say to me, ‘You will fail. That’s inevitable. It’s what you do with it.'”
Before Rowling became one of the wealthiest women in the world, she was a single mom living off welfare in the UK. She began writing about her now famous character, the young wizard, Harry Potter, in Edinburgh cafés and received “loads” of rejections from book publishers when she first sent out the manuscript, The Guardian reports.
“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 … By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew,” Rowling said during a 2008 Harvard University commencement speech.
She went on to say that she considered her early failure a “gift” that was “painfully won,” since she gained valuable knowledge about herself and her relationships through the adversity.