The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery
Sarah Lewis
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1451629249
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From celebrated art historian, curator, and teacher Sarah Lewis, a fascinating examination of how our most iconic creative endeavors—from innovation to the arts—are not achievements but conversions, corrections after failed attempts.
The gift of failure is a riddle: it will always be both the void and the start of infinite possibility. The Rise—part investigation into a psychological mystery, part an argument about creativity and art, and part a soulful celebration of the determination and courage of the human spirit—makes the case that many of the world’s greatest achievements have come from understanding the central importance of failure.
Written over the course of four years, this exquisite biography of an idea is about the improbable foundations of a creative human endeavor. Each chapter focuses on the inestimable value of often ignored ideas—the power of surrender, how play is essential for innovation, the “near win” can help propel you on the road to mastery, the importance of grit and creative practice. The Rise shares narratives about figures past and present that range from choreographers, writers, painters, inventors, and entrepreneurs; Frederick Douglass, Samuel F.B. Morse, Diane Arbus, and J.K. Rowling, for example, feature alongside choreographer Paul Taylor, Nobel Prize–winning physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, and Arctic explorer Ben Saunders.
With valuable lessons for pedagogy and parenting, for innovation and discovery, and for self-direction and creativity, The Rise “gives the old chestnut ‘If at first you don’t succeed…’ a jolt of adrenaline” (Elle).
blankets” into solid “sheets of armour-plate.”5 One man shattered his entire set of teeth from uncontrollable chattering in the frigid cold. The men felt “bruised all over, nearly dead.”6 No one has since bested the record that Scott and his crew set: all the men perished during the trip. The remaining five died within twelve miles of a camp where they had stocked food to refuel. It is often considered the great, unfinished journey of the Edwardian golden age of exploration and “the world’s most
stand on a piece of glass at a peak point at the Grand Canyon over the coursing Colorado River. The rational part of us would know that we’re safe on the glass, but being “affected by this visual stimulus” is enough to cause physiological sensations, which we may sense as trembling.24 “We all have a blind spot around our privileges shaped exactly like us,” Junot Díaz has said, and it can create blindness to failures all around.25 It results in the Einstellung effect: the cost of success is that
that it will replace silicon. This is a bonus on top of Novoselov and Geim’s main feat: identifying a phenomenon that has expanded what we know is possible in the world of physics itself. Graphene under the microscope. © Condensed Matter Physics Group, University of Manchester. The theory was that “Flatland” was a fantasy, just a whimsical invention from author Edwin A. Abbott’s mind.3 Physicists had long thought that objects with length, width, and no depth—meaning that electrons only move
idea for a book never comes to her “in a flash,” but is “a sustained thing I have to play with.”52 Yet outside of the creative process, play is a term that can hurt the concept it names. It’s nearly axiomatic that play is considered the opposite of much that we value—heft and thoroughness. Use it as a noun, an adverb, or a verb, and most of these words will only skim the surface of what play means, and what it can lead to. We recalled play’s importance when Antanas Mockus resigned as president
2012–2013, ed. W. M. Haynes (Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 2012), 4–14. 10. See Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 11. A blank, too, was how the analogous number zero was once described, from China to Babylonia, before the eighth century, before cultures found a way to denote it with a symbol. It was just a blank space. The result was that things not at all congruent looked very much alike and when zero was on its