Leadership and Business Wisdom - Motivational Speech For Entrepreneurs JK Rowling's life advice.

Byline: S. Kamal Hayder Kazmi

JK Rowling has some inspirational advice for graduating students - or for anyone in this universe, really. Her new book, out on 14 April, is her 2008 commencement speech at Harvard University. Proceeds from sales will be donated to, a charity for disadvantaged children founded through Rowling, and to a monetary aid program at Harvard. Some of her wisdom from that speech, for those of you who want to become an entrepreneur is below.

*The Harry Potter author's new book is based on an inspirational speech she gave to Harvard students*

Rowling, who came from a family where her imagination was seen as an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension, struggled significantly before becoming one of the world's most winning authors: 7-year after graduating, 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, with no being homeless. Only last week, she tweeted about the rejections she has attained in her career - even under the pen name Robert Galbraith which she adopted, after the success of the Harry Potter novels, for crime fiction.

The writer based her speech - the most viewed commencement speech on Harvard's website - on "failure and imagination". Delivered to some of the world's most elite students, her words went beyond the get-ahead cliches of careers advice.

On the advantages of failure

1. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, accountability lies with you.

2. I am not dull sufficient to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated; you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

3. I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution.

4. 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...