How JK Rowling Overcame Extreme Poverty & Depression Before Becoming a Millionaire From Her Harry Potter Books

JK Rowling must be one of the world’s most determined authors, as well as one of the most successful.

Growing up in rural England, her childhood was superficially good, but in reality, unhappy. Her mother was ill from multiple sclerosis and she barely spoke to her father. The germ of her Harry Potter series was already there, though, as she began to write fantasy stories.

Soon after she left university, Rowling’s mother died, something that affected her greatly. Struggling with grief, she moved to Portugal to teach English, and married there.

She left her Portuguese husband in 1993, and travelled home to the UK with their young daughter to start a new life. Penniless, she moved to Edinburgh to be close to her sister, but struggled to keep her small family afloat.

She felt that she was a failure, having lost her marriage and failed to establish a career. Without a job, she was clinically depressed and living on government handouts.

This was her low point, but it was also her turning point. Whenever her daughter fell asleep, she could focus on her writing, working on a manual typewriter as she could not afford a computer.

In her commencement address at Harvard University in 2008, Rowling said, “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.” She put aside everything that had been getting in the way and replaced it with a single-minded focus on her goal.

As she finished writing her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, she began the process of trying to get it published. 12 publishers rejected it, but one, Bloomsbury, published it because the CEO’s young daughter loved it. But even they had little confidence in it with an initial print run of just 1000.

The rest is history: the Harry Potter series went on to sell over 400 million copies and is a multi-million-dollar global brand.

JK’s resilience secret: She was able to find value in her rock-bottom point. As an unemployed single mother struggling to feed her daughter, she had no money, but she did have time to write. That time, and the way she used it, proved to be life-changing.