Sarah Lewis - The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2014 by Sarah Lewis

Gail Mazur, Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel, in Zeppos First Wife: New and Selected Poems , -17. 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Tracy K. Smith, Us & Co. from Life on Mars . Copyright 2011 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2014

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Jacket design by Francine Kass

Jacket photograph salt 9, 120 cm x 150 cm, digital pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 7, 2005, Murray Fredericks

About the photograph: predawn colors are reflected off of a rare rain puddle in the flat, arid saline ground of lake eyre in australia, one of the few salt flats on earth.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lewis, Sarah.

The rise : creativity, the gift of failure, and the search for mastery / Sarah Lewis.First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

p. cm

1. Creative ability. 2. Failure (Psychology) 3. Expertise. I. Title

BF408.L625 2014

153.3'dc23

ISBN 978-1-4516-2923-1

ISBN 978-1-4516-2925-5 (ebook)

For the prototype for principled, passionate pursuit, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, my parents, and the three graces

We never know how high we are

Till we are called to rise...

EMILY DICKINSON

My barn having burned down

I can now see the moon.

MIZUTA MASAHIDE

Men are greedy to publish the success of [their] efforts, but meanly shy as to publishing the failures of men. Men are ruined by this one sided practice of concealment of blunders and failures.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

... We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that its just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeatsmaybe its imperative that we encounter the defeatsbut we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.

MAYA ANGELOU

Anna Batchelor, Driving Bolivias Salt Flats , 2012.

Mike Osborne, Floating Island , 2012 (Bonneville, Utah).

Chris Taylor, Impossibility of straight lines , 2003, Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah. Photo: Bill Gilbert.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sonnet V (to Giovanni da Pistoia) with a caricature of the artist standing, painting a figure on the ceiling over his head, c. 1510. Pen and ink, 11 x 7" To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel, 1509. Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy. Photo: Studio Fotografico Quattrone, Florence.

Louis Horst, Paul Taylor and Dance Company Review, Dance Observer 24.9 (November 1957), 139.

Herbert Ponting, Grotto in an iceberg, Antarctica , 1911. Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

Martin Hartley, Route Finder, Adventure Ecology Trans-Arctic Expedition , 2004.

Martin Hartley, Navigator, Adventure Ecology Trans-Arctic Expedition , 2004.

Herbert Ponting, The Ramparts of Mount Erebus, Antarctica , 1911. Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

Lisette Model, Louis Armstrong , c. 1956. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museum. Lisette Model Foundation Inc. (1983).

Description of a Slave Ship . (London: James Phillips, 1787). The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 1881.d.8 (46).

NASA / William Anders, Earthrise , 1968.

Joel Sternfeld, Looking South on an Afternoon in June , 2000. Digital C-print; 391/2 x 50 in. (100.33 x 127 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Franklin Leonard, The Black List (detail), 2005.

Solomon Asch experiment, Scientific American , 1955. Reproduced with permission. Copyright 1955 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

Graphene under the microscope. Condensed Matter Physics Group, University of Manchester.

Frog levitated in the stable region . In M. V. Berry and A. K. Geim, Of flying frogs and levitrons, European Journal of Physics 18 (June 1997), 312. IOP Publishing Ltd and European Physical Society. Reproduced by permission of IOP Publishing. All rights reserved.

Levitating Frog . High Field Magnet Laboratory, Radboud University Nijmegen.

Samuel F. B. Morse, First Telegraph Instrument, 1837. Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Samuel F. B. Morse, Gallery of the Louvre , 1831-33. Oil on canvas, 733/4 x 108 in. Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.51. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

John Baldessari, Solving Each Problem As It Arises , 196668. Acrylic on canvas 172.1 x 143.5 cm (673/4 x 561/2 in.). Yale University Art Gallery. Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund, 2001.3.1

Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives , 1822-1823. Oil on canvas. 86 7/8 x 130 5/8 in. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Museum purchase, Gallery Fund.

The women of the Columbia University archery team stepped out of their van on a cold spring afternoon with a relaxed focus; one held a half-eaten ice cream cone in her right hand and a fistful of arrows with yellow fletching in her left; another sported a mesh guard over her shirt, on top of her breast as protection from the tension line of the bow. Baker Athletics Complex, the universitys sporting fields at the northern tip of Manhattan, seemed to have a set of carefree warriors on its grounds.

A man who maintains the property never thought they would arrive. Maybe he was new, because I asked where the archery team would practice and he looked at me quizzically. He didnt believe that archery was a real Columbia team sport. It was understandable. I had arrived early and the targets were not yet up. Releasing arrows at up to 150 miles per hour aimed at targets seventy-five yards away means safety issues for all around, so the archery team doesnt practice next to any other. Mastery of this high-precision sport stays largely out of sight.