Inspiration for a hump day

Sitting in my (Erin) office on good ol' hump day, an e-mail popped up on my screen from a friend. The e-mail included a link to JK Rowling's recent commencement address at Harvard - http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

It is a great speech, truly inspirational (way more so than Elizabeth Dole was at Brad and my graduation - I have absolutely NO idea what she spoke of that day, I just remember it seemed to go on forever and it was really hot outside!). Anyway, some of my favorite quotes in case you don't have time to listen to the whole speech:

• "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."
  
  
• "Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes."
  


• "Many 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. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. .... Those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy."

• "As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."

A snippit from another quote that I loved was: "I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp." Reminds me of the essay I wrote on my Stanford b-school application but that's a topic for another day...