Lessons From JK Rowling: Discovering Love By Mistake

Most of you already know who JK Rowling is. Yes, the famous novelist who has inspired the youth for several generations. One theme from her books is to discover love by mistake.

There is a saying that behind every great man there is a great woman (and vice versa), and we can also by adapting this idiom say that behind every successful person there is a story that we can learn from to also we should be able to discover love by mistake.

These biographies are often full of errors. In fact, I recently heard about an author, whose name I do not remember, who said that if his profession had taught him anything, it was his ability to “throw”. By that he meant throwing pieces of paper in the trash as what he had written was not useful. He accepted this as part of his work.

The first steps in a project are small

You may be wondering why I started this article talking about JK Rowling. I did it because of a speech she gave at the end of her academic year at Harvard University in 2008, which has become an inspiration for what I will say. She described what had happened to her a few years earlier and said that she had:

We all love those positive stories about people who have overcome great difficulties in their lives and managed to discover love by mistake. As for the case of JK Rowling, it seems that she would never have written Harry Potter if she had not gone through these difficulties. She claims that her intention in writing Harry Potter was not to achieve the success she has now, but to escape, clarify her ideas and somehow sort out her life.

She believes that it takes big investments to dream big, and especially if you are surrounded by all that propaganda that tells us that if we do not have all these products, we will not achieve what we want. We will not be so attractive, successful or popular…

Starting with small ambitions and investments means that we can manage the cost if we make mistakes. It allows us to have a margin of error if we have to postpone a project for a while. If we have not based our whole life around that project, it will be easier to get some ‘fresh air’ “.

The fear of failure and of discovering love by mistake

The fear of failure can be both an obstacle and a motivation. What happens will depend on several factors. The first may be self-love and being able to discover love by mistake. A person who acknowledges and respects himself will depend on it when there are currents that try to pull him to the bottom. The person who does not think he has anything to gain will give up and not even reach that bottom that will make him reach the surface again.

It also depends on the people around us. In Harry Potter, however, there is a paradox that is repeated within all of us: a certain tendency for loneliness must coexist with the need to relate to others, as we are the social animals that we are. It is failure, or the threat of failure, that teaches us who we can trust. These are the people who stay by our side, whether they agree with us or not. Their love is not conditional but they accept us for who we are.

If you want to achieve something, you have to take the first steps yourself

It is said that most teenagers feel misunderstood… and most college students, most young workers, most middle-aged workers, most older workers and most retirees. In fact, very few people find someone who supports them as they choose to pursue a particular goal. When it comes to teenagers, it is usually their parents who express this lack of understanding. Rowling experienced this lack of understanding in her own life as her parents did not agree that she should study English literature instead of modern languages. However, she also says that “there will come a time when you have to stop blaming your parents for leading you in the wrong direction”. Reaching this point is an exercise in maturity because it teaches us to stop blaming others, in this case our parents, and to begin to take responsibility for our own actions.

When an immature and impulsive person makes mistakes, this can result in wisdom. These mistakes give our successes a dimension, either because we have slipped away from those successes or because we are about to do so. There are many who are not aware of their successes until they feel that they may lose them or that they have actually lost them.

Mistakes lead us to times of crisis where the most important things in life are discovered. What are these important things? Nothing more and nothing less than what we already have… and what we have is ourselves, and what we have learned through our ups and downs. So when you fail, do not close your eyes – we should not feel sad or abandoned. We must have the strength to rise again and discover love by mistake so that the sun’s rays can once again reach us.

When you fall, try to break as few things as possible, but above all protect your self-esteem. That will be it and nothing else will help you move forward.