Sarah Lewis has served on President Obama’s arts policy committee, been selected for Oprah’s “Power List,” and held positions at both the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art. She received degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. In other words: she’s no stranger to success.
In her new book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Lewis sheds new light on what creative success means and how failure can be seen as a gift. “It’s something we are all fascinated with,” she says. “How do improbable, pathbreaking, great ideas actually happen?”
As she looked at the life stories of different creative types across disciplines, she noticed that the mastery we all celebrate in them comes from an unlikely source.
“Innovation doesn’t just come from success,” she says. “Despite having an excellent education, no one ever taught me that pathbreaking ideas are different from success.” Lewis discovered that what defines masters is often their ability to use failed attempts as corrections toward a deeper pursuit of their craft.
A major misconception people have is that failure is a dead end. “Failure as a word first came into the American lexicon in the 19th century, to connote bankruptcy. It was never meant to signify who we are or where we’ve come in our lives,” Lewis says. “I had to debunk that misconception for myself. Instead it is just like the seasons. We know that something that looks as if it’s final, winter’s deep freeze, will eventually result in spring. Life is the same way. Failure for me is an equivalent to that winter period.”
Another idea that Lewis tackles in her book is that of the deliberate amateur. She writes about two Nobel Prize winners in physics who incorporate this practice into their work. “These scientists hold Friday night experiments where they deliberately let themselves ask outlandish questions with beginner’s minds, questions that experts wouldn’t dare. The way in which masters keep their expertise is by knowing how to periodically give it up,” Lewis says.
At Winter Institute, Lewis will talk about the four main ideas covered in the book: the difference between success and mastery; being willing to surrender; incorporating play in order to get serious work done; and the distinction between grit and dysfunctional persistence.
“I’ll speak about how inventive ideas occur from improbable foundations, and the unlikely way I came to write this book,” Lewis says. “I would most like both my readers and the audience to be re-enlivened with the sense of their own capacity to extract gains from any circumstance and to rise as a result.”
See Lewis’s breakfast keynote on Tuesday, February 10, 8:30–9:45 a.m, in the Grand Ballroom.
