J.K. Rowling gave a stirring graduation speech at Harvard University in 2008. It was, in many respects, enthralling, and it rapidly rose to the top of the Harvard website’s list of most-watched graduation speeches. Rowling advised graduates to harness the power of their imaginations because imagination helped her reconstruct her life. She describes the idea and function of imagination in an intriguing way: “In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” She claimed that imagination is the root of all creativity and innovation, not only the uniquely human ability to picture the unreal, asserting that, “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.”
