Imagine an Asia where failure means we tried

Photo credit: Micah. H

He is deemed the most innovative and successful business leaders in our era; she is an outstanding writer, with over 100 million copies of her books sold since the first of the decade-defining series was published in 2007. Born in 1955, in San Francisco, California, he committed his life to design and in “making the best product” he could. 10 years later, she was born in a town with a population of about 20,000 people, and was starting to exploring the literary world.

Later in their lives, both encountered their own fair share of life-defining failures, and just like any famous people who’ve “made it”, they cited their failures like badges of honor in their commencement speeches in Stanford and Harvard respectively.

Many may not make direct comparisons between Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling, because they came from very different backgrounds, expertise, and industries. I only started noticing the similarities in the two successful individuals after browsing through their commencement speeches, one after another, in hope of finding motivation for a paper I was supposed to submit 24 hours later.

Freedom

The common denominator in both the speeches is how the word “freedom” was being brought into the picture.

They had said it after describing their failures.

Jobs mentioned his career failure and how it had became his most defining moment as a leader of Apple.

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

On the other hand, Rowling described her life’s failure as a divorced parent and penniless.

“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 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.

Imagination

Failure: As a student vs in Silicon Valley

Ending thoughts