The Power of Imagination

JK Rowling gave the 2008 graduation address at Harvard. You can read and watch it here.

I think it’s excellent, focusing on the benefits of learning from failure and imagination.

This section is the best for me:

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples minds, imagine themselves into other peoples places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are….

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

Related posts:

1. Power of Mobile Money In the early 1990’s I started work for one of...
2. Can I Clean Your Clock? Why China must wake up to clean power Thomas Friedman is one of my favourite authors. He has...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.