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

by Sarah Lewis

It is one of the enduring enigmas of the human experience: many of our most iconic, creative endeavors—from Nobel Prize-winning discoveries to entrepreneurial inventions and works in the arts—are not achievements, but conversions, corrections after failed attempts.

The gift of failure is a riddle. Like the number zero, 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 our greatest achievements come from understanding the importance of this mystery.

This exquisite biography of an idea is about the improbable foundations of creative human endeavor. The Rise begins with narratives about figures past and present who range from writers to entrepreneurs; Frederick Douglass, Samuel F. B. Morse, Maya Lin, and J.K. Rowling, for example, feature alongside choreographer Paul Taylor, Nobel Prize-winning physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, Arctic explorer Ben Saunders, and psychology professor Angela Duckworth.

The book explores the inestimable value of often-ignored ideas—the power of surrender for fortitude, the criticality of play for innovation, and the propulsion of the near win on the road to mastery, the importance of grit and creative practice. While not a how-to book, it contains important lessons for pedagogy and parenting, innovation and discovery, and self-direction and creativity.

The Rise is an inspiring book about what it means to be human as we struggle for mastery in our various spheres.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Self Help, Leadership, Personal Development, Philosophy, Art

273 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2014

About the author

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an art and cultural historian and founder of Vision & Justice.

Her research focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice, and democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

At Harvard, Lewis pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and is now part of the University’s core curriculum. She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London. She also served as a Critic at Yale University School of Art.

Her published books and edited volumes include bestseller The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, translated into seven languages, Carrie Mae Weems, which won the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize, and the “Vision & Justice” special issue of Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Her forthcoming publications include The Unseen Truth (Harvard University Press, 2024) and Vision & Justice (One World/Random House, 2025). Lewis’s article Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law, published in Art Journal (Winter 2020), won the 2022 Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association for “the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood.” An in-demand public speaker, her mainstage TED talk received more than 3 million views. She has had op-eds, commentary, and profiles of her work published in outlets including The New York Times, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Boston Globe.

Lewis was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2022. In 2019, she received the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African Americans.” Her research has received fellowship and grant support from the Ford Foundation; the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Whiting Foundation; the Lambent Foundation; and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Lewis currently serves on the boards of Thames & Hudson Inc., Creative Time, and Civil War History journal, and is a member of the Yale University Honorary Degrees Committee. Her past board service includes Harvard Design Press, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Brearley School, and The CUNY Graduate Center. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M. Phil from Oxford University, an M.A. from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.

Reviews

[Courtney Whisenant · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the most difficult book I've read since graduate school. The author's research and footnotes were quite impressive but the writing interfered with the effective presentation of her findings. If you're like me, you will need a dictionary to aid in the understanding of many words in the context in which they're used. I've always considered myself an educated person with above average intelligence but I concede that this book was over my head. I really enjoy books that make me think and I was hoping this would be that type book for me. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to comprehend the ideas and concepts presented well enough to engage in an intellectual thought process.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book as a goodreads First Reads giveaway.

Using examples from athletics, science, and the arts, Sarah Lewis examines the value of failure and "near wins" in ultimately reaching success. Included in the overall category of failure are criticism, both professional and personal, experiments that do not prove a hypothesis but point to other discoveries, and the inability to soldier on despite adversity. Essentially, Ms. Lewis' conclusion is that failure, in whatever form, can be used constructively to reach a larger goal.

There is no doubt that the author is extremely knowledgeable on this topic. Her work is well-researched and documented, and displays an impressive breadth of investigation. However, the writing style is more typical of a college textbook than a book designed for general consumption. In fact, I would argue that The Rise is quite appropriate for a college-level psychology course, and would be a very good requirement for Fine Arts or experimental science students.

Kudos to Ms. Lewis on a thoughtful, provocative volume geared for academia; however, I believe most readers will find it somewhat inaccessible.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book couldn't have come at a better time in my life. It is strength for the journey for all creative people. "My barn having burned down / I can now see the moon" - Mizuta Masahide

[Martha Love · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love that Sarah Lewis has explored how being persistent leads to success, taking a failure as a sign that one needs to continuing to push forward. She calls this important characteristic of persistence despite failure being "gutsy" or having grit. I totally resonated with her discussions pointing to the idea that for success being "gutsy" is more important than intelligence. I like that she includes the idea that teaching our children the importance of learning to push forward despite failure is of tremendous importance.

This book will really get you to reflecting and reassessing some experiences around failure of your own as well as ones you have observed in others. Here is an observation that I made some years ago and find quite relative to Sarah's discussions concerning "learning to fail": While in graduate school in psychology, I noticed a couple of teachers giving some straight A students a B or even a C on a paper. And when questioned by the students who received these grades, the response of the teachers was that they thought they needed to learn how to fail in their own eyes (I never thought a B was failing but some people certainly did). At the time, I personally thought the teachers were being a bit cruel, but now after reading this book, I have reassessed that decision and can see where they were coming from. I think that the teachers were trying to prepare the students for the constant revision process that often feels like failure to the candidate who is writing a thesis. Actually, however, I did not find that these students learned this valuable lesson of learning how to fail and be persistent from this experience of one lowered grade, as they were people who had long ago learned to push forward despite failure.

Thank you to Sarah Lewis as I won a copy of The Rise: the gift of failure, and the search for mastery on a Goodreads First Reads Giveaways and I quite enjoyed the information and research from all the many interviews that she took the time to have in her mastery of this topic on the gift of failure.

Martha Love
author of What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct and
Increasing Intuitional Intelligence: How the Awareness of Instinctual Gut Feelings Fosters Human Learning, Intuition, and Longevity

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to reading this book, as the topic is one I have thought about for years now. However, this book was not a pleasure to read. In fact, it was a lot of work, and I would have stopped reading it halfway through had I not gotten it in the First Reads giveaway and felt obligated to finish it.

The author's writing style really made reading this book a struggle. Most of the time, I would describe it as "lofty"--inaccessible to the average reader (I consider myself to be well-educated, but her choice of language was often way above me and/or confusing). However, at times she would have run-on or incomplete sentences. In addition, while some of the stories were interesting in places, the whole thing lacked focus, and I wasn't sure what she was trying to convey. The overall effect was that it read like a thesis with a catchy title by someone who was trying like heck to be impressive but failed to present a readable, cohesive paper that made a clear point.

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like a compilation of other people's thoughts. So many nonfiction books these days just seem to be taking what other people have said or think or feel or do and stringing them together. Like one of those necklaces you make at a craft table at a children's carnival.

[Meagan Schultz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Obviously we’ll researched but did not read “like Malcolm Gladwell” as one reviewer says on the back cover. Bottom line: failure is ripe for growth/lesson. It it could have been so much more enjoyable had she written it in a more user-friendly language, and not like a dissertation.

[Aiden Boyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Rise was recommended to me by my PhD advisor, who read it himself at the end of last year and found a lot of wisdom in it. He is trying to use a lot of the lessons as part of his new mentoring style which I believe has actively pushed away a new member of our group.

I read The Rise and think it is a mixed bag of a book. I don’t think I like it, and I’ll attempt to explain why, but I mentioned my story above because it could be a potential bias to my review.

Formally, I’d give The Rise 2.5 stars but its gets rounded up to 3 since Goodreads still hasn’t received this simple and basic feature of half-star ratings. The Rise is about the creative process and for me it seemed broken down into a few main lessons:
1.) mastery is more important than perfection
2.) failure is a learning opportunity to be embraced
3.) play is a quintessential part of the creative process

I think that the creative process and these lessons are supposed to be portrayed as some sort of rising journey but I don’t remember if this is stated directly at the beginning of the book. The way Sarah Lewis tries to articulate these ideas is through the collection and presentation of other peoples’s stories. These stories are probably the best part of the book, but they don’t always feel like they relate to one of the lessons that the author is trying to impart. My personal favorite were the stories from Andre Geim about the idea of “play” in the lab setting and how it can lead to incredible discoveries, as he used his own experiences with “Friday Night Experiments” to articulate. I also got to learn some interesting facts I did not know before. For example: The High Line in NYC was previously unknown to me, and the next time I’m in the city I’ll be checking it out.

I did not like the experience of actually reading this book. It’s written very academically and frequently reads like a scientific journal article. As someone who reads journal articles every week, this is an extremely tiring thing to see in a book. Sometimes I had to reread a paragraph or page a couple of times because the style in which it was written lends it to being confusing. My advisor made the comment to me off handedly that this was apparently written while Sarah Lewis was writing her dissertation, which would explain its more academic tone. I found that this was true from an article by The Harvard Crimson about Lewis and her book.

Probably the most unfortunate part of this book (my apologies to those who found this book life changing) is that the lessons feel like the extremely fundamental lessons that any growth-oriented person will learn by just living their life. They feel like obvious takeaways for anyone who has reflected on their choices at any point during adulthood. BUT, if you have not necessarily thought reflective like that before, then its still unfortunate because the lessons are not really that insightful. As another reviewer (catherin9 on Storygraph) put it in terms I couldn’t say any better myself: “I could have read an outline of this book and gotten the same value”.

[celine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Lewis’s TED Talk, which includes excerpts from this book, literally inspired me to study art in uni, gave me a sense of life’s meaning, and led to my first tattoo... so yeah, I rate this book pretty highly.

[Clayton Fuller · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Good: Sara Lewis is really smart and interesting. She's the kind of person you'd want to go to dinner with and say "hey, what interesting thing have you come across lately." I found this book relevant considering that I'm going through a career change (military lawyer to non profit startup)--so it was uplifting to read of the stories on failure in the book. I paid particular attention to the chapter on grit. Some of the themes she explores aren't groundbreaking--failure teaches us things that may get us to a greater success--the near win makes us hungrier, etc, but she is able to write about this is such lyrical prose and energy that they seem new. I'm fascinated by the black list and the Friday Night Experiments (which lead to a Nobel Prize).

The Bad: In the book she writes "I wrote this book, too, as a time capsule, a way to gather seemingly disparate stories to show their common themes" and at times I found some of her examples, exemplars, and quotes to be too disparate. As if she had this idea or quote and cobbled it into some of the sections because she at the very least wanted in the book.

The Interesting: The Asche experiment part is well worth the read. This experiment showed we tend to abandon our own opinion altogether when it differs from the group and when we have to state our dissent out loud. I found this often in the military--just never knew how to articulate it. I also liked the bit about the inventor of Spanxs whose dad would ask, instead of what did you do today, what did you fail at today?

The Takeaway: I need to doggedly pursue my goals, and also find a way to apply some of these lessons to public policy. Also, sometimes I hate experts or people with a great deal of experience. Again, a function of just coming out of a really bureaucratic environment--but sometimes being an amateur means you can make real discoveries.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to thank Sarah Lewis and Goodreads First Reads Giveaway for the copy of The Rise: the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.

I found there was a lot in this book which resonated with my own life. The book focused on how creativity, failure, and mastery all are interconnected. If you are expecting a grand solution this book is probably not for you but if you are willing to sit for a while and simply be present you will become more aware of how to develop grit, be willing to take risks, not fear failure, and create a life truly worth living.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to thank Sarah Lewis and Goodreads First Reads Giveaway for the copy of The Rise: the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.

I found The Rise read like a college text.

I will be able to use The Rise as a reference for a couple of college classes that I plan to take in the future, so it has value for me but it is not an easy to read as some of my other reference books that are similar in subject matter at a college level text.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book very much. I loved Sarah Lewis's storytelling, her use of examples from the arts and sciences to illustrate her point, which is fundamentally that failure, dead ends, amateurism (beginner's mind), and the melding of art and science, can produce remarkable advances in human understanding and personal success. I picked up lots of insights from the lives of Samual Morse, Czeslaw Milosz, Franz Kafka, Angela Duckworth, and modern day Antartica explorer Ben Saunders, but quotations and bits of biographical detail from dozens of other famous and not so famous folks are interwoven to create this quilt of a book.

It occurs to me that this is a must read for teachers, because they both face failure (as do we all), but more importantly have the responsibility to help their students move past failure, learn from it, and develop the grit to keep going.

In fact, the only passages I marked were those focused on developing grit in students. (p. 183). This, for example, gave me a lot of food for thought. "'Most schools are structured around 'mono-modal work' Randolph said, 'drilling down on one thing without seeing its interrelated connection to other ideas.' To teach students about grit, he realized that he would have to have them understand that there is no linear path." That opens up enormous possibilities for schools, if only they could break out of straitjacket thinking. Lewis notes that since 1990 the creativity scores of American students have declined while their IQ scores have increased. Time to revisit Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, "Do School Kill Creativity." Clearly, they do.

The book was written over a number of years as Lewis pursued one thread after another, through conversations, interviews, chance encounters, museum and art gallery exhibits, combing memoirs and biographies. It's quite a tour de force!

[Ryan Duda · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know when you read a book and think, ‘This author must think they are better than everyone else’? That’s essentially how it felt to read every single page of this book. The ideas she explains and the stories she tells are not really all the profound, but Jesus Christ, the way she writes is so unbelievably inaccessible. You need a dictionary with you while reading the book. It’s unnecessary. The author holds three degrees from three different Ivy League institutions - it’s clear she belongs to a different class and is too attached to the “need to prove I’m smart too you” culture that exists up there. Because, truly, the ideas she explores are not that profound. Failure is a key component of a creative “rise.” She buries the simplicity of this in mountains of anecdotes, interviews, Scripps Spelling Bee honorable mention words, and strangely constructed chapters where you stop multiple times asking ‘wait… did I skip a page?’.

Idk. Maybe I’m not smart enough to read this. But I have a Master’s degree and training as an artist. So I feel like I am the intended audience. It just felt so pretentious. Like all the toxic parts of art school. I should have known that when the first 5 pages are just various quotes raving about the book, that it was trying to gaslight me into thinking that this would be perspective shifting. In reality, I think these folks didn’t get it either, but were too afraid to admit it.

I just reread the quotes and I just finished this book ten minutes ago. What book were these reviewers reading?? They are referencing parts of the book that were literally one sentence or paragraph! Aaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, I know I’ve been giving lots of 5-star reviews and using plenty of superlatives and exclamation points but I gotta tell ya, WOW!! This is amazing. Sarah Lewis is an art historian who mines the connections between creativity, science, play, failure, grit, and will to drive mastery and human brilliance. I tried 3x reading Awe by Dacher Keltner (2x reading, 1x audiobook) and just couldn’t get it..wanted to love that work and just couldn’t connect, but what was missing there is all here for me in this one. Feels like so many connections between so many things and so much of what I’ve read before helped me to be ready to receive the complete gift of this book. It’s transformative!!

[Anya Toomre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I lost track of what the purpose of the book was - probably more to my interrupted listening of it. I really enjoyed, however, the long stories, providing plenty of background and context, which were fascinating. I especially enjoyed the section on archery, Samuel Morse's art career and then inventing the telegraph, and the subject of grit.

[Ben Thurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some nice moments in this set of reflections on various aspects of creativity – failure and the spur of "near wins", mastery and the gap between conception and execution, play and the permission to work without feedback from inner and outer critics – but the work as a whole felt forced to me. It felt like a series of essays, yoked together and expanded to book length, leavened by an almost scandalous amount of namedropping and associations the purpose of which seemed to be mostly to showcase the author's breadth of reading and interesting and varied social and professional circles.

I'd have read and appreciated any of the essays alone, I reckon. I wasn't totally convinced by the whole package.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was recommended this book because I had liked Grit, by Angela Duckworth. The range of stories and references are a lot broader than Grit, and the result is something a little less focussed. Still worth the read.

[Eric Dunlap · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read. Awesome to read about how failure can lead to success, and the driving forces behind sticking to your guns, creatively speaking. It uses a lot of historical examples to put things in perspective and makes some wonderful and surprising connections.

[Kelly Hubbard · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first thought on this book is chaos. It jumps from idea to idea with no clear point. The author put a lot of information on the page for you to read but there was no wrap up, no summary, no overall point on each concept. Just ideas. Just information. Just stories. It felt like she dropped all of this information she meticulously researched into your lap then left you figure out what it means and what to do with it. It is an incomplete book. Perhaps it is written this way so we can form our own opinion on the matter and not allow something like the Asch experiment to sway our views. Perhaps she took the section on incompleteness very seriously and used the disconnected parts as her way of living this principle. I don’t know why she wrote it this way but it was difficult for me to read.

On a positive note, it is well researched and interesting. It is an uplifting book that encourages people to realize the many barriers to success and how to overcome them. A lot of the book focuses on taking negatives and flipping them into positives. It lives by the idea that “it’s not what happens to you but how you respond to it.” It strives to make the reader bend their long accepted notions of failure and attempts to make the reader see failure as a step on the way to success and mastery.

I also found that a lot of what I was reading was not new information or new ideas. For me, a lot of this book could have been heard during church lessons and talks. I took a lot of notes while reading and the notes usually referenced a gospel principle. Here are a few examples… “To convert our own energy and operate at full force, often we must first surrender.” My notes on that quote, “Give it to God.” Another quote, “When we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power.” Another note, “Be meek. Not weak.” These are only a couple of examples of the many overlapping ideas from Lewis’ book and the teachings I have heard at church.

Overall, this book is a good read for those who are on a journey for mastery. It helps people to trudge on and not give up on their dreams. It gives them inspiration and even some direction on how to their achieve goals. I just wish it was done in a more polished way with a clear perspective.

[Fred Darbonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful read for anyone interested in developing their own creative capacities, Sarah Lewis helps us understand how our experiences with failure and setbacks can foster our inner resources to make corrections and fuel greater achievement. She makes skillful use of narratives to show us that many “iconic” breakthroughs are actually corrections after grappling with failure. She explores the differences between mastery and perfectionism, how near wins can motivate us, and the amateur’s “useful wonder” that can enable them to see what experts miss because their established knowledge bias can prevent them from seeing things in new ways. She differentiates between the unhealthy persistence that can come from the comfort of success, and grit, which she refers to as the “focused moxie” that is a sustained response to adversity.

Lewis takes us through an enlightening tour of creativity, failure, and mastery across a breathtaking swath of endeavor ranging from archery, arctic exploration, modern dance, urban development, the power of images, the motion picture industry, science, invention, and art and literature.

Sarah Lewis has served as a curator for both the Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art, is a Critic at the Yale University School of Art MFA program. She has served on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she will receive her Ph.D from Yale in 2014.

[David Cate · Rating 4 out of 5]

AS the pace of our productive world continues to whir into a rotation that is nothing short of a blur, we're starting to look back on what measurements we can as our efforts relate to success.

The first time Sarah's book moved across my radar was a podcast with Debbie Millman. Her podcast called Design Matters bridges art, design, philosophy and science into a nice cauldron of audible conversations that inspire me on my daily commute.

Sarah is an academic with a ivy league background. She's a expert on fine art and has an interesting book filled with antidotal references to success as it emanates from failure. Stirring from her experience in art and history she's able to echo the at-times frustrating and gritty paths inspired artists, explorers and inventors have followed in their life-changing success stories.

At times, academic and lofty, the book floats at an altitude that it times lofty and yet rich with perspective. Her awareness of painters, creatives, historical references and scientific studies are convincing and inspiring to anyone who strives to improve their creative pursuits and or leadership effectiveness.

Collectively, this is an entertaining and inspiring read well worth anyones effort to improve their confidence and understanding of the creative process.

[wade · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nicely researched book about why failure and how you deal with it is a major determinant for your future success. Lewis goes into widely diverse areas including dance, business and science to show how leading achievers met with a series of failures early in their lives but were unimpeded by their setbacks. The book also emphasizes how taking risks is important even though you realize the chance for success in those risks are small. It is all about how you bounce back with grit and self control. My only slight problem is that occasionally she seems to veer off topic.

[Mary Louise Schumacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

From my brilliant, insightful and soulful professor -- who encourages us to experiment and fail in her art history course. This book reads like a cultural history of self doubt. It is about the meaning inherent in the struggle to create and understand. A related recommendation: Sarah Lewis edited a special edition of Aperture earlier this year titled "Art & Justice" (also the name of our course). It should be required reading. For everyone.

[Carol Elkovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the writing in her book accessible and poetic. Like Malcom Gladwell, Ms. Lewis is able to condense complex studies and theories into easily understandable bites and draws connections that are astounding. I am recommending this book to anyone who endeavors seriously in creative occupations. The Rise is (ahem) uplifting.

[Bonita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truly a multidisciplinary read! Dr. Lewis pulled from the fields of art, biology, chemistry, engineering, history, sociology, psychology and others to discuss the concept of creativity.

I enjoyed the book but found it challenging to read on my daily bus commute. This is a read that required focus and reflection, at least in my case.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helps me find my centre. It's like a dreamy pep talk full of interesting bits of bonus information, and my nerdy little artist brain that was paralyzed by perfectionism loves it. Now I think in terms of the never-ending journey towards mastery, and I view failures as completely temporary and necessary learning steps along the path. The only way to fail is to stop trying. Onwards!

[Afsheen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a well researched book. My favorite part was the chapter called, The Grit of the Arts.

[Michael G · Rating 1 out of 5]

An obsequious and rambling book that appears to have been written for the express purpose of name-dropping. I can't believe I actually had the patience to read it through.

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very inspiring book for creative artists and innovators!