J. K. Rowling - Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor. I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom. I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiration 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.

What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humil iations and hardships. Climb ing out of poverty by your own effortsthat is something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is roman ticized only by fools. 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.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gift ed, and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartache. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the ca price of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of un ruffled privilege and contentment.