What I feared most for myself at your age / was not poverty, / but failure. // At your age, / in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, / where I had spent far too long / in the coffee bar writing stories, / and far too little time at lectures, / I had a knack for passing examinations, / and that, / for years, / had been the measure of success / in my life / and that of my peers. // Now, / I am not dull enough to suppose / that because you are young, / gifted / and well-educated, / you have never known heartbreak, / hardship, / or heartache. // Talent and intelligence / never yet inoculated anyone / against the caprice of the Fates, / and I do not for a moment suppose / that everyone here / has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege / and contentment. // However, / the fact that you are graduating from Harvard / suggests / that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. // You might be driven by a fear of failure / quite as much / as a desire for success. // Indeed, your conception of failure / might not be too far removed from the average person’s idea of success, / so high have you already flown. //Ultimately, / we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, / but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria / if you let it. // So I think it fair to say / that by any conventional measure, / a mere seven years after my graduation day, / 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,/ without being homeless. // The fears that my parents had had for me, / and that I had had for myself, / had both come to pass, / and by every usual standard, / I was the biggest failure I knew. // Now, 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. // I had no idea then / how far the tunnel extended, / and for a long time, / any light at the end of it was a hope / rather than a reality. // So why do I talk / about the benefits of failure? // Simply because 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 / where I believed I truly belonged. // I was set free, / because my greatest fear had been realized, / and I was still alive, / and I still had a daughter whom I adored, / and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. // And so rock bottom / became the solid foundation / on which I rebuilt my life.//