JK Rowling Harry Potter Success Story: Do You Believe In Yourself?

If you desire success as JK Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter book series, which has made her the richest writer ever, one question I will ask you is, “Do you believe in yourself?”

I have to ask you this question straight away because your success in achieving anything in life very much depends on it. Take a minute or two to think about what you want to do or have already started doing and look at yourself, do you feel you can do it? Are you convinced you could succeed at it?

Be honest to yourself now, if you think you are not intelligent, not smart, not skillful, not educated, not strong, or not good enough; or that you do not have enough money, or connections, to enable you succeed on the project, please don’t do it. It is better to go do something else because you will definitely fail in this.

I’m sorry if I sounded hash, but the truth is, you can never achieve success in anything without first having a strong belief you could do it. It is not possible, because the road to success is packed with challenges that must be surpassed to achieve it, and if you’re not sure you will succeed, you will easily give up against the very first difficulty that comes up.

The way to success is like a journey from point A to B and in-between there are stages to contend with. Take for example; you have this idea of creating a computer game. To get this game successfully into the market, it will need to pass through certain processes, such as, designing, production, marketing, and distribution.

Success will not just come about because you desired to have a computer game, you will have to make it happen by working out these processes.

But each of these processes or stages in your way to success comes with its challenges. You could have spent tons of hours, working day and night for several months only to end up with a design that appears to be dead from the start; a product only a handful of people seems to be interested in. If you didn’t have a strong belief in yourself and your product, you would immediately pack it up.

Innumerable number of great dreams have prematurely ended at the foot of rejection, and million more people the world over are everyday giving up on reaching success because the people they thought would believe in them and support them on their projects are not forth coming.

Don’t expect everyone to believe in what you are doing, in fact, be prepared to be rejected. But don’t ever reject yourself, your abilities and who you are!

You are unique and special in your own way. Don’t try to be someone else, and don’t get intimidated by other people’s successes or achievements. If you believe strongly in yourself, soon other people will begin to believe in you too, and you will also be celebrated.

Today, the name JK Rowling is widely known in many parts of the world for creating the Harry Potter series, but it wasn’t so about a decade ago. In fact, in 1993 she was on welfare and tending a baby while she wrote her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Without doubt, she believed strongly in her book, which she started in 1990, and completed five years later. But not many people thought she could succeed as a children’s book writer. Twelve publishers rejected the book before a small London publisher finally accepted to take it on.

Even then, the editor of Bloomsbury (the publishing company), out of his doubt about the success of the book, advised Rowling to get a day job as it was unlikely she would make money from it.

But Rowling’s belief in her work didn’t sway. The book was eventually published in 1997, with a print run of 1000, five hundred of which distributed to libraries.

Following the release of the book, a series of events started playing out to catapult a once massively rejected author into the world’s most successful and richest author today:

A couple of months after her book was published, she got a grant of £8000 from the Scottish Arts Council for her to concentrate on her writing. And the following year she got a deal of $105,000 from Scholastic Inc. to publish the book in the US.

Since then, Rowling and her Harry Potter Series novel have never looked back. They have leapt from one success to another, beyond anyone’s imagination.

Harry Potter and the Goblet, the fourth in the series broke sales records both in the US and the UK when it was released in 2000, selling three million copies in the first 48hrs in the US, and over three hundred and seventy thousand in the first day in the UK.

The sixth novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince equally shattered previous sales records for books the world over when it hit nine million copies on the day it was released in 2005.

Then came the seventh and last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007, breaking the last one’s record to become the fastest selling book ever published in the world. The book sold a staggering eleven million copies both in the UK and the US in 24hrs of release, making JK Rowling the world’s first billionaire writer.

JK Rowling couldn’t have reached this monumental success if she didn’t believe in herself. She moved on with her work, disregarding whatever anyone thought about her book not good enough to succeed. She was even compelled by her editor to use her initials as the author of the book, instead of her full name because the editor feared young male readers who are her primary audience would not be inclined to read a book by a female writer.

JK Rowling’s success story simply shows that there is nothing you cannot achieve if only you believe in yourself. You may be working on something that hasn’t been done before and people tell you it’s not possible. But it can be possible if you believe it can!