J K Rowling on Parental Expectations

The prize-winning author tells Harvard students at their Commencement exercises about coping with the pressures of parental expectations:

“I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.”

“They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. 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 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 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. What is more, I cannot criticise 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.”

J K Rowling’s entire address is posted at: Harvard Magazine, June 2008.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: J K Rowling

Related:

J K Rowling on Giving a Commencement Address

Muhammad Yunus: Falling Back on Instinct

In his address to graduates at MIT’s 2008 Commencement, Muhammad Yunus speaks about the importance of following your instinct in the absence of a road-map:

“I had no idea whether my life would someday be relevant to anyone else's. But in the mid-seventies, out of frustration with the terrible economic situation in Bangladesh I decided to see if I could make myself useful to one poor person a day in the village next door to the university campus where I was teaching.”

“I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. Out of necessity I had to find a way out. Since I did not have a road-map, I had to fall back on my basic instinct to do that. At any moment I could have withdrawn myself from my unknown path, but I did not. I stubbornly went on to find my own way. Luckily, at the end, I found it. That was microcredit and Grameen Bank.”

The entire Commencement address is posted at:

‘The Upside Down Thinking of Muhammad Yunus, Stories for Speakers and Writers, 10 June 2008.

Related:
Muhammad Yunus on Poverty

Muhammad Yunus on Changing the World

Muhammad Yunus: Success by Unconventional Wisdom

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “I had to fall back on my basic instinct.”

Stephen Covey on How I Found My Calling

Stephen Covey shares his journey of vocational discovery:

"It was understood that I would follow in my father’s footsteps and join the family business after college, but that plan changed during my mission, a period of missionary work undertaken by every young Mormon. "

"I was 20 years old and serving in Great Britain when my mission president asked me to lead a seminar to train the local leaders of the church. The leaders were 40, 50, and 60 years old. I said, 'I can't do this. There's no way.'"

"But my mission president told me that he had complete faith that I could do it and eventually persuaded me to take it on. He helped me prepare for the event, and it ended up going extremely well. I found I experienced a great deal of satisfaction from extending myself and really helping other people change their lives. That, to me, was so much bigger than going into business that I knew that I'd found my calling—I wanted to be a teacher, helping people to have happier, more successful lives."

Source: Jack Canfield & Gay Hendricks, ‘Stephen Covey,’ You’ve Got to Read this Book! (New York: Collins, 2007), 228.

Image: Stephen Covey

‘One Step Forward, Please!’

I had some currents of revelation recently on the topic of discernment.

I was ‘standing up to the plate’ at a urinal in the toilets of the Shanghai airport. I looked above, saw this sign (pictured) and dutifully, stepped forward.

While meditating on this sign, some truth trickled into my mind and then came as a pleasing rush: usually in discerning the way and making decisions about life, the most we are called to do is to take the next step. To take the step that is right before us. The step in front of our nose.

We are not always given a one or a five year plan of the way ahead.

So ‘One Step Forward, Please!’ might be the message that is flowing to you today.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: Isn’t it amazing the places where truth can be found?

Benazir Bhutto on Destiny

Sometimes events and responsibilities are thrust at us rather than being things that we choose.

This is most evident in the life of former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.

In her autobiography, Daughter of the East: An Autobiography, Bhutto writes of her personal sense of destiny when she takes the oath of office in 1988, at the age of 35—the first woman Prime Minister elected in the Muslim world:

“I had not asked for this role, I had not asked for this mantle. But the forces of destiny and the forces of history had thrust me forward, and I felt privileged and awed.”

Source: Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East: An Autobiography (London: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 392.

A review of this book is posted at Reviewing Books and Movies.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: Benazir Bhutto.

Discernment at New Year

In 1939 when Britain had entered into the dark, unknowingness of the Second World War, King George VI quoted in his Christmas message this excerpt from a poem by Minnie Louise Haskins:

I said to the man
who stood at the gate of the year,
“Give me a light that I may tread safely
into the unknown.”

And he replied,
“Go out into the darkness
and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you
better than the light
and safer than a known way!”[1]

Image: “That shall be…better than the light…”

[1] This poem was written in 1908 by Minnie Louise Haskins. It was used at the funeral of Her Majesty the Queen Mother on 2 April 2002. Her husband, King George VI, started his Christmas address to the nation in 1939 with it as well. Source: <>

Discernment like Discovering Coca Cola

Stumbling Upon Life Directions
In the online book, Making Life Decisions, I wrote about the different ways that we come to discern our life decisions, including those main ways of seeking and stumbling.

It is interesting to see a popular site on the Internet called, Stumble Upon, upon which people put sites, articles, videos and photos that they stumble upon.

On the Delancey’s Place site there was recently posted yet another example of stumbling upon what happened to be the man’s lifetime work. He was William Pemberton, the inventor of Coca Cola.

Story in Brief
"In May 1886 John Pemberton, a pharmacist who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, invented a drink. According to the Coca-Cola Company's official version, he was a tinkerer who stumbled on the right combination of ingredients by accident, while trying to devise a cure for headaches. ...

Further Detail
The real story is rather more complicated, however, "Pemberton was, in fact, an experienced maker of patent medicines, the quack remedies that were hugely popular in America in the late nineteenth century. ... Pemberton's attempts to make patent medicines had met with mixed success. ... Finally, in 1884, he started to get somewhere, thanks to the popularity of a new patent medicine ingredient: coca.

"The leaves of the coca plant had long been known among South American peoples for their stimulating effect; coca was known as 'the divine plant of the Incas.' Chewing a small ball of the leaves releases tiny quantities of an alkaloid drug, cocaine. In small doses, this sharpens the mind, much like caffeine, and suppresses the appetite. ... Cocaine was isolated from coca leaves in 1855, and it then became the subject of much interest among Western scientists and doctors. ... By the 1880s [Pemberton] and other patent-medicine makers were incorporating cocaine into their tablets, elixirs, and ointments. Pemberton's contribution to this burgeoning field was a drink called French Wine Cola.

"As its name suggests, this was coca-infused wine. In fact, it was just one of many attempts to imitate a particularly successful patent medicine called Vin Mariani, which consisted of French wine in which coca leaves had been steeped for six months. ... Pemberton copied the coca-infused wine formula and added kola extract too. The nuts of the Kola plant from West Africa were another supposed wonder-cure that had become known in the West at around the same time as coca, and also had an invigorating effect when chewed, since they contain about 2 percent caffeine.

"Sales of his French Wine Coca began to grow. But just when it seemed that Pemberton was on the right track, Atlanta and Fulton County voted to prohibit the sale of alcohol from July 1, 1886, for a two-year trial period. ... He went back to his elaborate home laboratory and started work on a 'temperance drink' containing coca and kola, with the bitterness of the two principal ingredients masked using sugar. ...

"The first advertisement for the new drink in the Atlanta Journal on May 29, 1886, was short and to the point: 'Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The new and popular soda fountain drink containing the properties of the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nut.' The new drink had launched just in time for Atlanta's experiment with Prohibition."

This story is about the art of tinkering, the way we often stumble upon our life directions and the importance of timing.

Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses, Walker and Company, Copyright 2005 by Tom Standage, pp. 232-238.

Source: Thanks to Delancey’s Place which sends an email excerpt a day.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: The real thing.