Network Marketing Journey

Reading Amy’s blog today pointed me to a commencement speech by J.K. Rowlings. She is the highly aclaimed author of the Harry Potter series–as if you didn’t already know that…

Like Amy, I highly recommend taking the time to listen to the commencement speech. She’s highly engaging, honest and inspiring.

While it is highly unlikely she will be remembered solely for her ‘gay wizard’ joke she made me laugh as she turned to her thoughts of her own journey.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard

Some of the points I’ll remember:

• There is an expiration date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction.
• Failure is the stripping away of the unessential.
• You will not truly know yourself until tested by adversity.
• Happiness in life isn’t a checklist of achievements.

Each of these things and more is waiting for you at the link I provided above. I really do recommend you give it a listen. As I listened to her talk about her own experiences and the lessons she learned, I recognized the same lessons within my own–rekindling them.

With that I want to leave you with a final quote from her speech:

I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.

And I echo that final thought: I wish you all very good lives.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!