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).
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leading an orchestra, you have to know how to turn your back to the crowd, as the saying goes.46 Taylor’s dances still have those pedestrian movements at their core, no matter how kinetic the piece. They occur in his best works. “There’s no question these dancers are virtuosos,” New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay said, but “it’s remarkable how frequently basic features recur in many of his finest works: walking, running, falling, tilting, kneeling . . .”47 In the 1982 piece Lost,
it can block our ability to see when what has worked well in the past might not any longer. In the face of entrenched failure, there are limits to reason’s ability to offer us a way out. Play helps us to see things anew, as do safe havens. Yet the imagination inspired by an aesthetic encounter can get us to the point of surrender, making way for a new version of ourselves. Our reaction to aesthetic force, more easily than logic, is often how we accept with grace that the ground has shifted
David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad.9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and
that he admits is not perfect, but still strong. For some, creating the Black List itself would have been enough, but Franklin still seems to be searching, trying to close a kind of gap—the distance between quality screenplays within a thousand-script-high pile and those executives who should have them in their hands. It is, in part, a curatorial pursuit that I identify with, an interest in scouring the world for what we’re failing to see, to proffer it back in the form of a list, a show
Thinking, 183, 247 Tower of Babel (Bruegel), 197 Townsend, Kathleen Kennedy, 75 Tracy, Jessica, 208 Tremont Temple, 89–90, 91 Trial, The (Kafka), 23 Tucker: The Man and His Dream, 128 Tudor, David, 40 Tversky, Amos, 25 “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, The” (Snow), 189–90 Tyson, Neil de Grasse, 158 Uber, 112 Ullrich, Jan, 80 “Ulysses” (Tennyson), 68 unfinished, 19, 22 United States, education in, 174 “Unknown Masterpiece, The” (Balzac), 19, 52 “Us & Co.” (Smith), 195
