Dennis Chang, Dux Medal winner and 2012 Head Boy.

Promotion 24, this evening I would like to address you on one of the most important ingredients of success... failure.

I am sure that all of us present here today have suffered the low self-esteem that comes with failure. Failure is a very important lesson in life. The most successful personalities of our generation have suffered the most unforeseen failures.

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was one of these. He came from a working class family who saved all the money they could to send him to one of the finest colleges in the USA. After 6 months he withdrew from the course he was enrolled in. He couldn't see the value of it. However, he didn't quit college. He started dropping in on classes that interested him.

At the age of 20, Steve Jobs started Apple in his parents' garage with his friend, Steve Wozniak. Ten years later, Apple had become a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. And then the unimaginable happened - he was fired from the company he had dedicated all his adult life to! He and the board of directors had a difference of vision and so he was dismissed.

It was a very humbling experience but he did not stop doing what he loved best. In the next five years he created the companies NeXT and Pixar. Pixar produced the world's first animated feature film, "Toy Story", and NeXT was bought by Apple. Steve Jobs was back at the company he had helped to build.

In his famous graduation speech at Stanford University in 2005 he reminded us of the positive power of failure:
"...getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything... It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith."

Another genius who did not lose faith and learnt about the positive power of failure is J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. Like Steve Jobs, J. K. Rowling came from a poor family who had saved hard to send her to university.

In her commencement speech at Harvard University in 2008, Miss Rowling recalls that what she feared most as an undergraduate was not poverty but failure. Seven years after her graduation ceremony she admits that she had failed on an epic scale: her marriage had lasted just a few years, she was unemployed, a lone parent and poor. She was a loser by all definitions with little light at the end of the tunnel!

However, as in the life of Steve Jobs, her failure became the liberating experience she needed to succeed. At Harvard she explained:
"Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I... began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that really mattered to me... I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, 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."

Miss Rowling summed up the positive power of failure thus:
"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not live at all – in which case, you fail by default."

Promotion 24, do not fail by default! Do not regard failure as a backward fall which makes you regress various steps; regard it as a forward fall from which you will pick yourself up and advance.

One of the greatest basketball players of all time, Michael Jordan, said:
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Promotion 24, it's OK to fail. If you work hard, are caring and learn from your failures, amazing things will happen to you.

Andrew Cino, Headmaster