Rowling is the perfect example that success can come to anyone at any time. She is now doing the backstroke through a pool of Harry Potter money, but that was not always the case. Before Harry Potter became a success she was a divorced mother, living on welfare, going to school and trying to write a novel in her spare time.
Rowling herself said she was the “biggest failure I knew” and credits a lot of her success to her failure.
At a Harvard commencement speech Rowling had this to say, “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 to 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 area where 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 a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Source:developgoodhabits