An inspiring speech delivered by JK Rowling at a 2008 Harvard University graduation ceremony is to be published in full. The speech has become the most-viewed "commencement address" on the university's website, with fans across the world taking the Harry Potter author's words to heart.It will now be published in a book entitled Very Good Lives, with proceeds going to Rowling's charity Lumos, which aims to end institutionalisation of children.Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard president, said: "I have heard and read many commencement speeches, none more moving and memorable than JK Rowling's."Years after her visit to Harvard, people still talk about it - and still find inspiration in her singular evocation of the idea that living a meaningful life so often means daring to risk failure."Here are some of Rowling's words of wisdom:Be memorable.Reflecting on [the speech at my graduation] has helped me in writing this one, because it turns out I can't remember a single word of it. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without fear that I might influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the 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.Take parents' advice, but don't be bound by it.The only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both from impoverished backgrounds, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage or get a pension.Sorry, Freud, it's not your parents' fault: give up blaming them once you hit adulthood.There's an expiry date on blaming parents for steering you in the wrong direction; when you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.Fail on an "epic scale".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.Work on what you love.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 in which I believed I truly belonged.Life is not a checklist.Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people who confuse the two. Life is difficult, complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive.Cherish your friends.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. We are bound by affection and the knowledge that we hold photographic evidence that might be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for prime minister. ..