Jk Rowling Research Paper

When you hear “JK Rowling” what are your first thoughts? Wizards? Magic? A dark haired scrawny boy with crooked glasses and a lightning bolt scar? He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named? JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series has sold thousands of copies in over 200 countries and in 60 different languages. She’s broken multiple records for the fastest selling book. She’s ranked as the wealthiest woman in the United Kingdom and the second most influential women in history. Yet, the truth is, JK Rowling was not always sitting on top of the world; in fact, she once described herself as the biggest failure she knew. At one point, Rowling was unemployed, depressed, suicidal, and single mother who never thought she would make it anywhere. When she went to get her first

installment of what would become one of the best selling series in history published, it got rejected by a dozen publishers and the only reason it got published at all was because the CEO's eight year old daughter begged him to publish it. Rowling emphasized in a commencement address she gave at Harvard University in 2008: "Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential." It is this failure that formed the foundation of her success. Moreover, embracing her fallibility ultimately helped her to thrive even more. For this reason, failure is not an option, but rather essential because it is merely one of those fundamental experiences that works a type of magic in us that typically can't come in any other way.
However, most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. For one thing we tend to view as rare and bizarre. For another, it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed. Like the term paper returned to us covered in red ink, being wrong makes us cringe and slouch down in our seat; it makes our heart sink and our dander rise. However, of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our biggest mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. What I want to do today is to convince you that: first, far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, and courage; second, far from being intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition; and lastly, far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part part of how we learn and change.
Benjamin Franklin once observed that “wrongness is a window into normal human nature: into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, and our extravagant souls.” As that suggests, our errors sometimes bear far greater accolades than the failure and shame we associate with them.

Although they might represent a moment of alienation, both from ourselves and from a previously convincing vision of the world. But what’s wrong with that? To alienate means to make unfamiliar; and to see things, including ourselves, as unfamiliar is an opportunity to see them anew. One person who was able to do this was C.P Ellis, a former klansman of the Ku Klux Klan. According to Kathryn Schulz in her book Adventures of the Margin of Error, during the televised broadcast of the 1988 Democratic Convention, Ellis (who at time had been out of the Klan for eighteen years) told Studs Terkel, “They say the older you get, the harder it is for you to change, but that’s not necessarily true. Since I changed, I’ve set down and listened to tapes of Martin Luther King. I listen to it and tears come to my eyes, because I know what he’s saying now. I know what’s happening.” Ellis’s transformation depicts that it takes courage to leave our past selves behind, but it takes even more to carry them with us, accept that we have erred, and recognize that we have changed with compassion. In essence, wrongness is always an opportunity for such

transformations.
However, for our errors to help us see things differently, we have to see it differently first. This is conveyed in Glyn Humphrey’s book Case Studies in the Neuropsychology of Vision. According to Humphrey, in 1992, neurologist George Goldenberg gave an examination for a patient at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. He began by asking the patient to describe his face. It was an odd question, but the woman complied. The doctor had short hair and was clean shaven, she said. Goldenberg next asked her about an object in front of her. It was a notebook, she answered. And where exactly was the book located, the doctor asked her. He was holding it up in his left hand at just about eye level, she replied. However, the problem was this: Goldenberg’s face was concealed behind a screen, the object in front of his patient was a comb, and before asking about the location, he’d hidden it beneath the table in front of him. The patient was blind. One month earlier, she had suffered a stroke that destroyed virtually her entire visual cortex and left her all but unable to move. All that was bad enough, but the patient was also left with a stranger problem: she didn’t know that she was blind. This condition is called Anton’s syndrome and it belongs to a group of similar neurological problems collectively known as anosognosia or the denial of disease. What anosognosia demonstrates is that to blind without realizing it is, metaphorically, the situation for all of us when we are in error. Although the feeling of knowing something is incredibly satisfying; however, it is not a very good way to measure the accuracy of our knowledge because, as anosognosia suggests, wrongness knows no limits and there is no form of knowledge that cannot fail us.
The consequence of ignoring this is illustrated in an incident that occurred several years ago. According to Bob Wachter in his article Another Case of Wrong Site Surgery, in 2008, a woman comes into Beth Israel Medical Center for a surgery. The surgeon performs the surgery, stitches her back up, and sends her out to the recovery room. Everything seems to have gone fine until the patient wakes up, looks down at herself, and said, "Why is the wrong side of my body in bandages?" Well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one. When the vice president for health care quality at the hospital spoke about this incident, he said something very interesting. He said, "For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient." The point of this example is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous. This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in reality. More so than anything, it misses the whole point of being human.
St. Augustine once wrote "Fallor ergo sum. . . I err, therefore I am." Augustine understood that our capacity to err is not some kind of embarrassing defect in human nature, or something we can eradicate, but rather something that is totally fundamental to who we are. For good and for ill, humility about the complexity we live in and the complexity we’ve created will serve us better in the long run. In essence, the magic of our minds isn't that we can see the world as it is: it's that we can see the world as it isn't because seeing the world as it isn’t is not only the definition of erring but also the essence of imagination, innovation, and illumination.