U.S. President Barack Obama mentioned J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter specifically in his back-to-school address to students on Tuesday:

The truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK.  Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Not a bad message.  Along with JK Rowling and Michael Jordan, he mentioned the founders of Google, Twitter, and Facebook as examples of hard work paying off.