The Success Admiral™ Blog - The Quest for the Ultimate Undiscovered Treasure

New Format & Direction

The Success Admiral™ — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:17:56 +0000

It’s been over a year since I’ve posted to this blog, and after the birth of my baby girl (Jasmine) I have a new perspective on life.

While the previous format of this blog was to inform people on how to be successful, I believe that in my haste to help others I missed a vitally important part of the process – to first discover the unfound treasure of “Ultimate Success”.

In my new and exciting journey through the world, I will provide posts, insights and discoveries as I explore the seas of information, the lives of incredible people and the history of world literature for this unfound, or lost, treasure.

My end goal is to have discovered the consistently sought after treasure throughout the ages, that eludes so many as to the definition of what it truly means to have the authentic rare and precious masterpiece of Ultimate Success.

I hope you will join me on this new discovery and explore the world of the past, present and future.

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

About the Author
My name is Adam Aulenback ("The Success Admiral™"). I have made it a personal mission to search the world over for clues, definitions, meanings and any inference of what many seek and never find...and that is Ultimate Success.

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How to Give Back
If you would like to assist in the discovery for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success, you can send this post to a friend here and/or you can donate to the efforts of TheSuccessAdmiral.com

via check, money order, or cash.

To donate please use the following mailing address:

Adam Aulenback
c/o TheSuccessAdmiral.com
22 Springvale Avenue
Halifax, NS B3N 2A2

Please make checks payable to "Adam Aulenback."

Thank you for your support and encouragement!

May you live with Success & Happiness!

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The Definition of “Ultimate Success” (a work in progress…)

The Success Admiral™ — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:00:28 +0000

…in this space will be provided the working definition of “Ultimate Success” as we explore the seas of information in search of the ultimate unfound treasure…

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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Sometimes Smart People Finish Last

The Success Admiral™ — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:48:13 +0000

Ever hear someone say “They’re just too smart for their own good?” Well, it’s definitely true for some people when it comes to approaching success, or the consideration of the risk of success.

Did you ever analyze a task that had a huge benefit if you were successful and a huge risk if you failed. Even though it could have completely changed your life, which choice did you make? Did you take the risk? Or did you analyze yourself out of taking action?

If you didn’t take the risk, have you ever thought and wondered “what if”…? What if you took the risk? What if you failed? What if you succeeded?

If someone didn’t have the same “smarts” such as knowledge, IQ or reasoning skills that you had, and if they just took the action, would they have made the same choice – and where might they be today?

Do you perhaps know someone who has achieved a great feat, or certain level of success, but you know that they’re not as “smart” as you?

It’s a debate that my friends and I recently had – my opinion has been that what makes you successful is not thinking, analyzing and wondering, it’s facing the fear of not knowing the outcome of your actions, and acting in the face of the fear anyway! Fear will always be apart of life when you are unsure of an outcome that you care a lot about.

How bad would it really be if you tried and failed? Do you know that virtually all great things in our man-made existance have been the result of failures? For example: the light bulb – did you know that Thomas Edison failed over 3,000 times before he found the successful formula. If Thomas Edison had stopped after 2,500 attempts, can you imagine what life would be like without the light bulb? How many inventions were based on the light bulb…think about it….

If you attempted to achieve something a failed, what would you lose that you could not regain? Money? Posessions? Material nothingness (that’s my word of the day )

Now what would you gain if you took action – no matter the risk? How committed would you have to be to do that? What would you have to think, believe and act like to do that? What do you think Thomas Edison thought, believed and acted like?

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team…one of the greatest basketball players of all-time was cut from a basketball team because he wasn’t good enough – can you imagine what would have happened if he gave up after that?

In 1974 Sylvester Stallone was offered many times not to play the role of Rocky – he was even offered over $300,000 at one point…but he refused and said he would not sell his script unless he starred as the lead role. They finally agreed and while filming he made only $6,000 total – and then when the film was released he became an international movie star and made millions! What can you learn from Stallone? Do you have a passion that if you followed could lead you to your dreams?

Now, let’s think for a moment – what if any of the above individuals stopped because of fear, because of failure, or because of the fear of failure? Can you imagine the experiences that the world, and you personally, would have been robbed of if they gave up?

Now let me ask you a question. What gift do you have that you are robbing the world of by not taking consistent action on, or that you gave up on, because of your failure or fear of failure?

Think about that for a moment…let it sink in. What if you were the next Thomas Edison, Michael Jordan, Syvester Stallone, or someone equally important to the future of mankind – what if you were…you? And what if you gave the world your gift in spite of the fear or failure you experience?

How would that change your life? How would that change the life of all those around you and the many generations that haven’t been born yet? Remember, you have at least one special gift to offer the world – and it’s up to you to persist and make your gift to the world a reality.

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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The Fundamentals of Success

The Success Admiral™ — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:42:44 +0000

POWER SUMMARY

• Experience
• Information
• Certainty
• Decisions
• Action

FULL POST
There are 5 fundamentals of success that are the core of creating success in your life. Just as any great, in any area of life will tell you, you need to practice the basics, master the basics and use the basics.

Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Vince Lombardi – to mention a few – subscribe to this principle, and look where it got them.

Most people get too wrapped up in the “secret” action, that if they only knew it, would provide them with instant success and gratification. While it would be great if this were the case – on second thought if everyone could do that it would be a very different reality – but we need to put forth consistent effort using the core fundamentals that I will outline below.

Experience

Before we can create what we want in life, we need to know what we want to create. For if we do not know what we want, we will create anything.

First, you need to be clear in your mind about what you want to create. One great tool is to visualize, as clear as you can, a vivid image of your intended reality. Then, try to see the reality as if it were your future – through your own eyes – and experience the joy, and pleasure of your newly created reality.
Information

Second, we need to gather just enough information so we can make a decision or take action. Many people get stuck here doing too much research, and ultimately become paralyzed though “analysis paralisys”.

The key is to get just enough information so you can make an informed decision – not perfect (never perfect!) – you will get feedback from your action, and that is the goal. You want to be able to go in the right direction, not down the perfect road.
Certainty

This is a major difference between winners and losers. If you look at some of the greats in life, they have tremendous certainty about what they are doing or about who they are. Either way, this transfers to their appearance of being confident – and confidence sells!

Michael Jordan was a great example of this – he would take the shot when the game was on the line…because he was certain he could do it! While he didn’t make the basket every time, he took the risk, and was confident enough to do so.
Decisions

No matter what, you’re making a decision – whether you intend to or not. If you don’t make a decision, you’ve made the choice not to do anything…and that is far worse than if you attempted to do something and did not obtain your intended outcome, or as most people know it, fail to reach your goal.

Decisions are something that successful people do every day – and very successful people are good at making decisions. The more you perform a skill, the better you will become at it. Every time you are faced with a decision, view it as an opportunity to increase your decision making skill, and then stick with it!
Action

Action – the most important of all the fundamentals put together! If you do only one of these, I urge you to always take action. And take massive action when ever you can!!!!

No great person ever made it to where they are today by sitting on their hands, they got out there and they took action…they made many mistakes, failed many times, and took more action because of it!

One of the best books I’ve read to date that covers the power of taking action has to be without a doubt Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! (link to Amazon.com). In this book Anthony Robbins explains the importance of taking massive action – I highly recommend this book.

If you own this book, you should take it off the shelf and re-read it! If you don’t already own it, you should definitely buy it! Definitely worth the money!!!

Now use this simple 5 step process, and go out there and make it happen!

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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The Crossfit Experiment – 30 Days to Fitness and Weight Loss – Day 8

The Success Admiral™ — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:48:56 +0000

POWER SUMMARY

• Shaved 8 minutes off my time
• Lost 6 pounds since last week (-2.45% body fat)
• Now 10.78% body fat (goal 6.6%)
• Have more physical energy & feel great!
• 21 days remaining

FULL POST
It’s been one full week since starting Crossfit and the Zone Diet block method, and I have seen some great results already!

After my workout last Wednesday, I was feeling the results…! I took Thursday off as a rest day, then I did modified “Chelsea” workouts as active recovery sessions to prepare for the class I did tonight. The Chelsea workout is made up of the following:

5x Pull-ups
10x Push-ups
15x Squats (with no weight)

The goal is to do the above every minute on the minute for 30 minutes. I varied how many rounds I did during my active recovery session this past week – from 5 rounds (5 minutes) to 15 rounds (15 minutes).

The reason I didn’t do the full 30 minutes was that I was a bit sore from last Wednesday’s class – and it’s best not to push it when starting a new training routine, for can get better results faster if you pace yourself over the first few weeks of a new regimen.

I definitely notice my areas of strength and weakness – due to my strength training and power-lifting background, the weight bearing / body weight exercise portion is not difficult for me, but the endurance portion / my lactic acid threshold is definitely my weak points.

I really enjoy this type of training for it’s gradually increasing my overall conditioning, not just power and strength (the side-effect of standard bodybuilding workouts).

Tonight’s warm-up was the same as last week:

15 minutes dodge ball: if you get hit with a ball, you must complete 10 repetitions of what is written on the ball. Some of the activities included burpees, push ups, sit ups, etc….

Then as a group we completed a workout dubbed “The Four Corners”, it comprised of the following (trying to get your fastest time):

50x Burpees
40x Jump Squats
30x Push-ups
20x Box Jump Burpees

I completed this in 19 minutes flat – a big improvement over last week (while it was a different workout), I shaved over 8 minutes off my time And I even donated blood 6 hours earlier!!!!

While last week we had an approximate 300m run after the 20 repetitions, I believe I would have been at least 3 minutes faster if we had completed the run tonight.

By combining my Crossfit training with the Zone Diet block method I have achieved the following physical results:

-6 pounds
-2.45% body fat

The goal I set out for myself in the last post was to reach 6.6% body fat, I am currently 10.78% with 3 weeks to go. If I can keep these results going, I will definitely reach my goal!

The one major benefit I am finding is that I have more physical energy throughout the day – it’s almost as though I had been drinking coffee (and I’m not a coffee drinker).

I believe the combination of the Crossfit training and Zone Diet block method cleanses the body very well and it allows my body to get the best nutrition possible – I’ve cut out sugars and grains on a regular basis (although this Sunday past I had a piece of cake for my Pop’s birthday – and last night I had one slice of pizza… )

I am truly excited to see my results over the next 21 days as I continue this experiment – my next update will be Wednesday, July 29th – see you then!

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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5 Reasons Why I Changed My Blog Look and Layout

The Success Admiral™ — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:54:12 +0000

Recently I’ve been doing some research for an upcoming experiment on how to increase my blog traffic and subscribers.

I found a lot of information that is quite helpful from CopyBlogger.com, StevePavlina.com, and ProBlogger.net (to name a few).

The following are the reasons for changing my WordPress theme:

More Professional Appearance

The color scheme provides a more professional appearance, while conveying a more relaxed atmosphere on the page.
Cleaner Design

When you look at some of the largest websites on the internet (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook,etc…), they tend to use a simple design that’s easy to navigate. Also they usually have a solid white background (apart from user defined backgrounds).
Greater Flexibility for Expansion

While the “notepad” theme was unique, it limited the expandability for new sidebars and updated features on-the-fly. Most plugins and widgets for WordPress would not work with my previous theme, and that was the first reason I was looking for a new WordPress theme.
More Organized Structure

The layout of the blog is more intuitive than before. This 3-column theme allows for more organized data to be available while keeping it in it’s own separate place (instead of adding it at the end of each post).
Prominent Social Bookmarking

More businesses are making thousands of dollars through social media websites and the use of social bookmarking. This is the evolution of viral marketing at it’s best (so far).

If you are considering a new look for your blog, you may want to consider these points to make sure your readers/visitors are getting the most from your site.

Aside from changing my theme, I’ve also decided to implement a new feature to future posts. I will include a “power summary” of the post before the full content. This gives my readers a chance to explore what the post is about, and allows for greater usability.

Within the power summary, I will provide links to the detailed information in the full post under it. I believe this will be a benefit to all who visit my blog, and create greater value so people can extract the information they want almost immediately.

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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You can follow Adam on Twitter (@AdamAulenback), subscribe to the rss feed here, or you can get this blog in your email here.

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The Crossfit Experiment – 30 Days to Fitness and Weight Loss – Day 1

The Success Admiral™ — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:12:25 +0000

I have decided to create a Crossfit experiment to test my personal fitness results using the workouts and following the suggested Zone diet (used by many Crossfitters).

While I have won many trophies in natural bodybuilding (this picture is when I won the Classic Physique show in 2008), and have been apart of the health and wellness industry in one way or another for most of my life, I have had a recent lack of enthusiasm to increase my health and fitness – so I have decided to socially, and globally, launch this experiment to display my results and progress.

First of all, I will explain what Crossfit is. Unlike the training I’m use to for natural bodybuilding, Crossfit involves the use of all areas of fitness to complete workouts.

The Crossfit website explains it as:

CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.

…

The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs.

The needs of Olympic athletes and our grandparents differ by degree not kind. Our terrorist hunters, skiers, mountain bike riders and housewives have found their best fitness from the same regimen.

Thousands of athletes worldwide have followed our workouts posted daily on this site and distinguished themselves in combat, the streets, the ring, stadiums, gyms and homes.

You can find out more information about Crossfit on their website at http://www.CrossFit.com

I took measurements which I will update on a weekly basis to provide my results. Currently my body fat percent is 13.23%. My goal body fat percent for August 15, 2009 is 6.6%.

If you would like to calculate your body fat percent you can do so at http://www.linear-software.com/online.html. I use the Tape Measurement Method, you simply need a tape measure and a scale

Tonight I did a Group (approximately 25 people or so) Crossfit workout with experienced Crossfitters, below is the outline of our training:

15 minutes dodge ball: if you get hit with a ball, you must complete 10 repetitions of what is written on the ball. Some of the activities included burpees, push ups, sit ups, etc….

Then for time, where you tried to complete the following the fastest as possible:

50x burpees
40x flutter kicks
30x double unders
20x lunges w/ 15 pounds
300m run (including stairs and a hill)

The time it took me to complete this was 27.36 minutes – the best time in group was 11.20 minutes – I failed big time! I was so out of condition that I thought I might puke at one point…and I took 2 1/2 times longer than the leader to complete it! This was a great motivation for me

I set a goal time for the same workout on August 15, 2009 for 13.7 minutes – 1/2 the time I just did.

I have also adjusted how I am eating, and I am following the Zone Diet using the block method.

Each block consists of mini-blocks of protein, carbohydrates and fats. With the right balance of protein, carbohydrates and fats, you can control three major hormones generated by the diet – insulin, glucagon and eicosanoids.

Insulin – A storage hormone. Excess insulin makes you fat and keeps you fat. It also accelerates silent inflammation

Glucagon – A mobilization hormone that tells the body to release stored carbohydrates at a steady rate, leading to stabilized blood sugar levels. This is key for optimal mental and physical performance.

Eicosanoids – These are the hormones that ultimately control silent inflammation. They are also master hormones that indirectly orchestrate a vast array of other hormonal systems in your body.

You can find out more about the Zone Diet using the block method at http://www.zonediet.com/EATING/Overview/tabid/79/Default.aspx

A list of “block” measures for food can be found at http://www.mitymous.net/weights/zoneblox.htm

Tomorrow I will take as a day off, today really took a toll on me. I will be back for day 3 of this experiment with the routine I used and my results.

If you want to try this with me, you can do most workouts without equipment! You can review the workouts on the Crossfit website.

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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It was Failure that led to the Success of Harry Potter!

The Success Admiral™ — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:09:49 +0000

That’s right – failure is responsible for the outstanding success of the Harry Potter series.

J.K. Rowling (Joanne Rowling) progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling’s fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom. Since then, Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world.

Convinced she was born to write novels, her parents had other aspirations for their daughter. They thought she had a personality quirk of an overactive imagination and did not think she would be able to create income to pay bills or for a mortgage by writing novels.

Joanne said in a speech to Harvard graduates last year (the complete speech will be included at the end of this post):

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. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. …

…the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

These are the insightful and profound words of the now famous and wealthy Harry Potter author. She had hit rock-bottom! She had realized her greatest fear of being a failure and then she talks about the benefits of failure!

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because 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 into 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 arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, 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 the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Here Joanne talks about being “set free” because her greatest fear had been realized – in other words she had nothing else to lose! She then talks about how she shifted her frame of mind by being grateful for what she had – her daughter, an idea to achieve something she loved and the tool to make it a reality.

What most people don’t realize is that “some failure in life is inevitable”! Only those who are so cautious to not fail, do not fully live – so by default you have failed by the greatest margin and cheated yourself out of true success and happiness.

Then from her biography (http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/biography.cfm) she writes:

…and knew that unless I finished the book very soon, I might never finish it; I knew that full-time teaching, with all the marking and lesson planning, let alone with a small daughter to care for single-handedly, would leave me with absolutely no spare time at all. And so I set to work in a kind of frenzy, determined to finish the book and at least try and get it published. Whenever Jessica fell asleep in her pushchair I would dash to the nearest cafe and write like mad. I wrote nearly every evening. Then I had to type the whole thing out myself. Sometimes I actually hated the book, even while I loved it.

Finally it was done. I covered the first three chapters in a nice plastic folder and set them off to an agent, who returned them so fast they must have been sent back the same day they arrived. But the second agent I tried wrote back and asked to see the rest of the manuscript. It was far and away the best letter I had ever received in my life, and it was only two sentences long.

It took a year for my new agent, Christopher, to find a publisher. Lots of them turned it down. Then, finally, in August 1996, Christopher telephoned me and told me that Bloomsbury had ‘made an offer.’ I could not quite believe my ears. ‘You mean it’s going to be published?’ I asked, rather stupidly. ‘It’s definitely going to be published?’ After I had hung up, I screamed and jumped into the air; Jessica, who was sitting in her high-chair enjoying tea, looked thoroughly scared.

And you probably know what happened next.

Joanne knew that if she didn’t take action, she would probably never complete the goal she had to write her book. Even with everything she had going on in her life, she made a way to fit her passion into her life.

Then when she had completed her novel, she sent it to an agent and she was turned down! The following is from http://news.scotsman.com/jkrowlingharrypotter/The-JK-Rowling-story.2436228.jp:

When the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finished, early in the New Year of 1996, Rowling visited Edinburgh Central Library to look up the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book in search of a literary agent. Her first approach had been unsuccessful: a brief rejection letter. She then posted a sample of three chapters and a covering letter to Christopher Little Literary Agents, based in Fulham. It was here that a young reader, Bryony Evans, read the first chapter and laughed. Evans passed the chapters to Fleur Howle, a freelance reader, who agreed with her assessment and together they persuaded Little to sign up Rowling. A few days later Rowling received a letter asking for the remainder of the manuscript. The agency sent Rowling’s 200-page script to 12 publishers, all of whom, to their eternal regret, turned down the book. Harper Collins showed interest but was too slow in formulating a bid and so the first book by the most lucrative writer in the world was picked up by Bloomsbury for an advance of £1,500.

There is no question that Joanne worked hard to get to where she is today. Her determination, imagination and action despite her failure and current life situation, created her success in life that she enjoys with millions of fans around the world.

Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

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 would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they 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 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 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. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised 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, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because 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 into 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 arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, 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 the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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100,000 Twitter Followers in 30 Days – The Experiment, Day 30

The Success Admiral™ — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:56:46 +0000

The end has arrived. Throughout these past 30 days, I’ve learned a lot about the limitations and environmental conditions of Twitter – even though I have failed to achieve my goal, it is through this failure that I have learned a lot about Twitter.

A lot of people have asked me how failure leads to success. While I have not succeeded in my original definition of the goal I set out for this experiment, I will achieve my goal through perseverance and learning at every obstacle along the way. Here’s the part that most people don’t understand – I’m proud of my failure…and I don’t view it as a failure, I view it as a success Each failed attempt to reach my goal becomes a valuable learning experience, and by learning from these attempts I will be able to maximize my efforts to achieve my goal in the future.

The most beneficial tools I found for getting new followers were (and they’re free):

Twollo.com
(Find and Follow Twitterers with similar interests to you)
TweetLater.com
(A website that allow to post twitter messages on a scheduled scheme.)
TwitterFeed.com
(Announce your blog post on Twitter with a customized message using TwitterFeed)
Twitter Karma
(A Flash application that fetches your Twitter followers and who you are following – it also has the capability to add or remove those you are only following and those that are only following you)

I hope these tools can help you as much as they have helped me.

I will be updating my progress from time-to-time to keep you posted on my progress toward the goal of reaching 100,000 followers!

...continue to join me in my quest as I search seas of information for the unfound treasure of Ultimate Success...

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100,000 Twitter Followers in 30 Days – The Experiment, Day 29

The Success Admiral™ — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:52:20 +0000

I have been conducting this experiment to increase Twitter followers using only free websites and services. Over the last few days I have been researching different paid services and have evaluated the pros and cons of them. While some provide an interesting promise of interactivity, my opinion of how they are viewed when “auto posting from them” in the Twittersphere is less than optimistic. I’m of the impression that most Twitterers will see most of these “automated” messages as spam…this is the reason I have chosen not to use these software packages.

Perhaps I’ll try something in the future, but for now I’ll continue on the same path.

Tomorrow is the day of transition from one experiment to another. I will post the new experiment objectives and goals in tomorrow’s post!

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