J.K. Rowling

Inner Keys to Success:

• ADVERSITY CAN BRING OUT THE BEST IN YOU, IF YOU LET IT: JK described her situation best at the Harvard commencements saying “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 realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” It was in JK’s toughest times of depression and poverty that she initially created the Harry Potter Books. The fact that she hit rock bottom was what allowed her mind to clear up and realize what she loved most.

• BE INSPIRED BY YOUR OWN LIFE, NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE: Rowling used her life as a road map and used her books to fill in the pieces. She utilized her real life experiences as an inspiration for her dreams and ambitions. Even from the characters she used in Harry Potter resembled some of her real life influences. For example, her mother’s death gave her a more in depth description for Harry’s emotions of his mother and fathers deaths. JK Rowling took from the happiest and darkest parts of her life to create a masterpiece that others can relate to. Often self-expression is a major key to a successful life.

• PURSUE YOUR PASSION WHOLEHEARTEDLY: Rowling persistently embraced her passion for imagination and fantasy from the early get-go. She would tell fantasy stories to her younger sister and continued to indulge in the realm of creating stories all through her life. She states “I would read absolutely anything at all. My favorite writers were E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis and I used to read adult writers as well. I would read absolutely anything, the backs of cereal packets.” This eventually led to her adventurous non-fiction novels being exposed on a global scale. She was even fired from a job because she was consistently day dreaming about creating the Harry Potter books that the world would soon encounter.

Little Known Success Fact:

Rowling went from being unemployed and living on welfare to becoming a multi-millionaire in the span of five years. On a postponed train from Manchester to London, she wrote her first Potter ideas on a napkin. She also typed Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on a manual typewriter, usually writing in Edinburgh cafés and trains with her daughter Jessica Mitford who was named after Rowling’s childhood heroine.