Watch Me Entertain Myself!

Sacha Guitry once said, "You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty." Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.
(pilot episode: 20 January 2004)

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Advice Squad (Part 2)

Thanks to Fried-Neurons (Hey doodz! You disappeared from the blogsphere for so long, I thought you’d never return; glad to see you’re back. And I agree, her address kicks ass!) for pointing out the following to me.

* * * * *

To Coy, Joe and other fresh grads (and anybody else interested, for that matter):

Trust your Lola J.K. Rowling to deliver a whiz-bang Commencement Address. Her “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” address given at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association is a wonderful—I’m tempted to say magical, oops, there I said it—call to live a life of courage and empathy.

I love how she is able to be witty and heartfelt, tackling serious subjects yet never taking herself too seriously. And I especially love the following: “(S)ome 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.”

Listen to her wonderful speech below or download from here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

sure mcvie. you can link me as i did you.

oh... and thank you for the podcast of j.k. rowling's speech. beautiful...

Marcus: Bading Down Under said...

I loooooved this speech. I thought it was well written and there was the balance of serious and funny.

Thanks for the heads up. :-)