I stumbled across this book in a very circuitous fashion. First, I was listening to a new podcast series, The Good Life Project, on my iPhone. The podcaster was interviewing a very well spoken and incredibly bright woman on the importance of failure and how it's linked to creativity.
A few weeks later as I updated my TED Talks app on my iPhone, I noticed a new podcast by Sarah Lewis with the familiar title of "Embrace the Near Win." Being a proud geek, I instantly downloaded it and began listening to it on the way to work. It all sounded so familiar. It took another minute before it dawned on me that this was the very same well spoken and incredibly bright woman that I hear previously on The Good Life Project.
After watching this, I was hooked and think I ordered the book from Amazon before the TED Talk was even over.
Now about a month and a half later, I've finished it.
Lewis did her undergrad at Harvard and did work at Oxford before earning her PhD from Yale. She currently is a faculty member at Yale and will teach at Harvard in the fall.
Oh life must be so tough to be so talented.
Her book certainly doesn't disappoint. It is one of the most in-depth, research driven things I've ever read. This, perhaps, is why it took me a month and a half to read!
In her quest to explore creativity, how failure is actually a gift, and how they combine to allow one to actually attain mastery, she truncates her exploration into three sections: The Riddle, The Crucible, and The Gift.
My favorite part from the first section, The Riddle, is her exploration of "The Archer's Paradox," which is the phenomena of how great archers can become so good and so focused on hitting the target that they actually lose focus and begin to miss. She studied this one afternoon by spending three hours watching the Columbia archery team practice. What she learned was that some archers actually have to aim at a target in their mind just off from their real target in order to hit it again. Thus, Archer's paradox.
Lewis explores this as a way of analyzing how experts overcome failure and also strive tirelessly to attain mastery. One of my favorite quotes from Lewis, and one I wish every one of my students will never ever forget is, "success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can't do it again and again." So in other words, success is fine but mastery - performing again and again when it counts - is what really matters. I love that.
Lewis' second section, The Crucible, focuses on the conditions and trials, many of which lead to utter failure, that masters go through in order to attain mastery. She focuses on Ben Saunders and his quests as a polar explorer. She examines how others, like Louis Armstrong and Frederick Douglass rose above their circumstances to achieve amazing things. And then she uses New York City's amazing High Line (which is an abandoned rail road track that has been left to nature's devices and has sprouted green, plush grass and flowers. Now it is a treasure of the city) as an example of how breakthroughs and creative pursuits often spring out of nowhere.
The third section of the book, The Gift, was the most interesting. She first focuses on something I had never ever heard of before, "The Black List," developed by Franklin Leonard. The Black List is one of the most influential lists in all of Hollywood - if not the world. Leonard grew tired, working in Hollywood, of only certain types of movies being made. So he came up with a brilliant idea, anonymously he emailed Hollywood types (directors, writers, producers, and so on) asking them to list their favorite scripts that had yet to be produced. The list threw light on to what Hollywood types really thought without worrying about making a profit. In other words, Leonard found a way to allow script writers and directors to throw light on the best scripts in Hollywood honestly. As it turns out some of the decorated films of the past decade have come about as a result of the Black List, which, of course, is a reference to the notorious Black List of Hollywood during McArthyism when anyone in Hollywood who was linked to communism was placed on the Black List and denied work.
Then Lewis examines what was my favorite chapter, "The Deliberate Amateur." This chapter is too amazing to do justice here, but she explores how vital it is for even the best and brightest to do two things: have fun and fail. The title, the deliberate amateur, is the state of mind one must adopt in order to not only innovate but to actually attain mastery. Two lines especially struck me from this chapter - the first is from the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Andre Geim: "The biggest adventure is to move into an area in which you are not an expert. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search." The second line which resonated with me was "An amateur is unlike the novice bound by lack of experience and the expert trapped by having too much. Driven by impulse and desire, the amateur stays in the place of a "constant now," seeing possibilities to which the expert is blind and which the apprentice may not yet discern."
The final chapter, "The Grit of the Arts," is a close second to "The Deliberate Amateur" as my favorite chapter from The Rise.
Here is - perhaps - by favorite paragraph from this chapter.
This chapter features an interview with Angela Lee Duckworth, who works in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth focuses on a subject near and dear to my heart: American students.
"'People ask me all the time, 'Are kids in America workng too hard?' Yes, there are privileged kids who are over-programmed, but,' Duckworth said, her voice more firm, 'I think in life, most people are giving up too early.' If we go by the studies, it is not talent, not even self-esteem, but effort that makes the difference in measurable forms of achievement. It leads to the surprising fact that self-esteem increased amongst American children in the 1990s from its 1980s and 1970s levels -- a laudable trend, but measurable achievement has not improved along with it. Higher self-esteem without higher levels of achievement means 'many American kids, particularly in the last couple of decades, can feel really good about themselves without being good at anything.'"
This is where we, as parents, aren't teaching our kids the value of effort and hard, hard work. When I read that I was reminded of what one of my former students, Sara Korpi, told my College Comp classes when she spoke to them last year: "I'm not the brightest but I'm too stubborn to fail." If that's not grit, I don't know what is.
And as Lewis uncovers, grit is vital in turning success, which is doing something successfully once or maybe even twice, into mastery, which is what the world can never have enough of.
No comments:
Post a Comment