SUCCESS FROM DEVASTATING FAILURES

J.K Rowling is the first billionaire writer of the world. She became richer than the Queen of England just by writing novels. It didn’t happen overnight. 

She is a classic example for rags to riches success story. Penniless, recently divorced, raising a child on her own and suffering from depressions, she had to face countless challenges.

Twelve publishing houses rejected her original Harry Potter manuscripts. A small publisher Bloomsbury finally gave her a chance with a small advance. The publisher warned that there was no money in children’s books and hence she should get a day job for her livelihood.

Nobody could predict that it would become the bestselling book series in history. J.K. Rowling crossed net worth of more than 1 billion U.S Dollars in 2014. 

What if she stopped at the first or next rejection? What if she gave up by the devastating failures?

J.K Rowling succeeded because she applied the perseverance principle aptly described by Winston Churchill: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

When J.K Rowling spoke to the graduating class of Harvard, she didn’t talk about success. She talked about failures, her own in particular:

“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."

"You might never fail on the scale I did. But 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.”