The benefits of failure

At her Harvard commencement speech, “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling offers some powerful, heartening advice to dreamers and overachievers, including one hard-won lesson that she deems “worth more than any qualification I ever earned.”

 Her story itself is a prime example of the ‘rags to riches’ genre which itself is particularly effective for demonstrating how we can learn from failure and how the actual benefit of taking risks can often outweigh the lack of opportunities that is the result of not taking risks.

Her storytelling technique is just as interesting. She uses a very effective technique namely the false start, although this is no surprise as she is possibly the world’s best know contemporary storytellers.

This technique involves telling a predictable story and building a false sense of security in the audience and then shocking them with something unexpected or an unforeseen turn. It is a great attention-grabber as it disrupts the audience’s expectations and is very effective a demonstrating how you learned form an experience and grew from it.