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Read a recent (investing) article that quoted a convocation speech by J. K. Rowling (of Harry Potter fame), thought it was pretty good, copied the relevant section below.

Rowling’s speech was about two things: failure and imagination. As many people know, she has known her share of failure en route to becoming a literary sensation:

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.

And although she found failure far from ennobling, she pointed out that few of us can escape it. “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,” she said.