在罗琳新书出版之际卫报上刊登了一篇报道。罗琳新书的名字叫 Very Good Lives: the Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.简译《非常好的生活：失败的边缘利益和想象力的重要性》，书是基于她此前在哈佛大学为毕业生做的演讲的内容，可能很多人和我一样都看过了。在这篇报道里温习她说过的建议却仍然觉得受益很多。以下是卫报里quotes的中文翻译：
有关失败所得
总有一天你不能再抱怨是父母将你带到了错误的方向；当你足够成熟到驾驭你人生的方向盘，所有的责任都抛在了你肩头
我还没有迟钝到假设因为你们年轻、有才华，受过良好教育，你们就不会了解困苦和心碎的滋味。才华和智力从来不会让任何人获得对反复无常的命运的免疫力
我不会站在这个告诉你们失败多有趣。我生命中的那一段时间是黑暗的。那时的我完全不知道那一段时间会被媒体描绘成童话故事一般的解决方案
失败意味着剥离那些不重要的东西。我放弃假装自己可以是别的什么人，而是把我所有的能力都倾注在对我来说唯一重要的事情上。如果我在其他的什么事情上成功了，我可能永远也找不到在自己真正所属的领域里成功的决心
有关想象和移情的力量
我们不需要魔法去改变世界，我们自身已经拥有所有我们需要的力量：我们有能力去想象更好的世界
许多人选择不去练习他们的想象力。他们选择安全地留在他们自身经验的局限里，不会费力去想象其他的可能的人生
那些选择不去用心体会的人会驯养出真正的怪兽。 虽然我们自己没有做出绝对邪恶的事情，但通过我们的冷漠，我们与之形成了共谋
在我二十多岁时的每一天，我都被提醒生活在一个民选政府当政的国家是一件多么幸运的事情，在这里法律代表和公共审判是每一个人的权利
当我十八岁时在古典作品的长廊里漫步、搜寻当时我并不能准确定义的东西的时候，我学到的其中之一来自希腊历史学家普鲁塔克：“我们内心的实现会改变外在现实。”这是一个惊人的论断，但在我们生活的每一天，它都在上千次地被证明是对的。从某种程度上说，它表明在我们和外在世界不可逃避的联系中，我们仅仅通过存在就触碰到了他人的生活
生活和故事一样：最重要的不是长度，而是过得有多好
英文原文：
On the benefits of failure
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, responsibility lies with you.
I am not dull enough 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.
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.
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.
On the power of imagination and empathy
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They 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.
Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: ‘What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.’ That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
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