The Rise

How do you respond when life knocks you down—when your plans go awry, when success slips through your fingers, and all that remains is the echo of effort? In The Rise, Sarah Lewis invites you to see those moments not as defeats but as starting points. She argues that failure, far from being an endpoint, is often the foundation of creativity, resilience, and mastery. To rise, she contends, is not simply to overcome failure—it is to use it as fuel for transformation.

Lewis builds her thesis around a deceptively simple idea: what we call failure is often just the gap between where we stand and where we hope to be. That gap, that stretch between mastery and incompletion, contains our most fertile ground. Through stories of artists, scientists, explorers, and athletes—from Michelangelo to Andre Geim, from Paul Taylor to Ben Saunders—she reveals how 'the rise' itself, not the victory, defines real excellence. Failure becomes an act of becoming—an unfinished masterpiece that forever propels the creator forward.

Rethinking Success

Lewis asks a provocative question: what if success isn't the pinnacle but the beginning of decline? In modern culture, mastery often masquerades as perfection—a static state achieved by a select few. Lewis dismantles that notion, showing how true mastery is dynamic, iterative, and rooted in humility. Michelangelo’s struggles while painting the Sistine Chapel, Cézanne’s endless revisions, and Faulkner’s obsessive rewriting illustrate that greatness resides not in a final product but in the perpetual striving toward vision. These figures understood that incompletion is not failure—it is the heart of genius.

At its core, The Rise redefines creativity as a process of conversion. Every artist, innovator, or maker faces the curve of effort—the painful but generative tension between intent and result. This is the 'archer’s paradox' that Lewis introduces in her opening chapter at Columbia University’s archery field: an arrow must aim slightly off-center to strike true. The act of hitting the mark requires displacement and correction, not flawless precision. Likewise, our own growth demands deviation and course correction. Each failure, each near miss, reshapes the self that is trying to create.

Failure as a Catalyst

Drawing from psychological studies and real-world examples, Lewis introduces a new emotional lexicon for failure. Rather than shame, failure can foster clarity; rather than loss, it can ignite purpose. Duke Ellington loved his next composition most—the one he hadn’t yet written. Einstein confessed his mathematical shortcomings to a schoolgirl, turning vulnerability into connection. Polar explorer Ben Saunders risked his life to complete Robert Falcon Scott’s unfinished trek to the South Pole, discovering that surrendering to fear unleashed unforeseen strength. Each of these individuals reframed difficulty as discovery, turning defeat into momentum. (As in Carol Dweck’s concept of a 'growth mindset,' Lewis expands failure into a lifelong practice of learning—continuous, adaptive, and rooted in curiosity.)

The Arc of Creativity

Lewis argues that creativity itself demands failure. Artistic and scientific breakthroughs often begin in what she calls 'the crucible'—the pressure zone where expectations collapse and imagination ignites. She juxtaposes the choreographer Paul Taylor’s disastrous 1957 performance, which earned only blank reviews, with Andre Geim’s 'Friday Night Experiments,' playfully reckless trials that led him to levitate a frog—and eventually win the Nobel Prize. Through these stories, Lewis reminds you that progress rarely comes from stability. It emerges from experiments that flirt with absurdity, yet generate insight. Failure gives coherence to exploration; it forces creators to ask better questions.

Why The Rise Matters

Lewis situates 'the rise' in a wider cultural argument: we have become obsessed with perfection at the expense of perseverance. Schools reward correctness over curiosity; workplaces prize flawless execution over risk. But the creative heart beats in uncertainty. Lewis shows that mastery unfolds through deliberate practice, grit, play, and humility—the ability to be both expert and amateur, confident yet open to failure. Echoing Angela Duckworth’s research on grit and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow, she contends that enduring discomfort is the price of real achievement. You rise by falling forward—by meeting defeat with attention instead of avoidance.

What You’ll Learn

Across Lewis’s beautifully structured chapters, you’ll learn how failure shapes creative and moral growth. You’ll encounter the paradox of mastery, the discipline of surrender, the influence of aesthetic force on justice, and the playful humility behind innovation. You’ll see why critiques, blank pages, and near wins often matter more than triumphs themselves. By the end, Lewis leaves you with the haunting image of Mizuta Masahide’s poem: 'My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.' In loss, there is clarity; in failure, illumination.

Ultimately, The Rise is not a celebration of hardship for its own sake—it is an invitation to reframe how we live. To rise is to recognize that our unfinished selves, like Michelangelo’s rough-hewn stone figures, are already moving toward greatness. Failure is not the opposite of success. It is the foundation of art, wisdom, and the human spirit’s enduring ascent.

Lewis begins her journey on the archery fields of Columbia University, watching women aim their bows with astonishing precision. The sport becomes a metaphor for all human striving. In archery, an arrow must leave the bow off-center to hit the target true—a phenomenon called the archer’s paradox. You aim slightly away from what you want in order to reach it. Lewis uses this paradox to illustrate how progress often depends on imperfection and course correction. To achieve mastery, she argues, you must embrace error as a guide, not a shame.

Split Vision and Constant Correction

Archers develop 'split vision,' the ability to focus on both the target and the curve of the arrow’s flight. Success demands continuous recalibration. Similarly, every creative pursuit—from painting to entrepreneurship—requires living in this dual focus between what exists and what might. Lewis shows that mastery arises not from certainty but from flexibility. She describes Duke Ellington’s refusal to dwell on previous triumphs—his favorite song was always the next one—to emphasize that ambition must bend with the bow’s tension. (As psychologist Carol Dweck’s 'growth mindset' suggests, enduring mastery is adaptive, not fixed.)

Discipline and Grit

Watching Columbia students practice for hours, Lewis marvels at their resilience. They train until muscle memory takes over; then they relearn everything when precision falters. This cycle, she writes, mirrors artistic development. Cézanne repainted the same still-life scenes endlessly because he believed each canvas revealed something new. That iterative process—the fall, the correction, the rise—is what establishes mastery. Angela Duckworth’s research later echoes this principle, proving that grit and deliberate perseverance, not talent alone, predict achievement. You must be willing to endure repetition, frustration, and near misses to hold the tension that creates excellence.

When Failure Is the Teacher

On the archery field, moments of failure instruct more deeply than success. One misplaced arrow, Lewis notes, may teach an athlete to adjust posture or breathing more effectively than a hundred bull’s-eyes. The same is true for innovators. Thomas Edison’s 10,000 failed experiments honed the process that made the light bulb possible. William Faulkner rewrote The Sound and the Fury five times after publication because he believed his masterpiece was still unfinished. In these examples, failure is not a verdict—it’s a compass. Each setback points toward refinement.

Success vs. Mastery

Lewis distinguishes success from mastery with precision. Success is a finite event—a trophy, an accolade, a peak moment that can never evolve. Mastery, by contrast, is a lived process, an infinite game. Like archers who practice endlessly, you reach for a deeper understanding of the craft itself, not the applause. Lewis’s sentence captures it best: 'If I did a perfect dance, I think I’d quit.' For artists, scientists, or seekers alike, perfection ends growth. Mastery thrives in the tension between aspiration and reality—in the slight misalignment that keeps creation alive.

The 'archer’s paradox' becomes the book’s central metaphor for the human condition. To hit the target, you must first aim wrong. To rise, you must bend. It’s a potent reminder that excellence is born not from precision alone, but from the courage to adjust mid-flight.

Lewis devotes an entire section to history’s most revealing trait among masters—their obsession with unfinished work. Michelangelo prayed that he might 'desire more than I can accomplish'; Cézanne wept over canvases he deemed incomplete. Through these examples, Lewis reframes incompletion as a deliberate stance, not a flaw. The greatest creators, she argues, understand that completion is false closure. A masterpiece lives through its imperfections—the cracks through which new ideas emerge.

Michelangelo’s Tormented Perfection

Lewis paints Michelangelo not as a serene genius but as a laboring soul wracked with doubt. In letters from the Sistine Chapel, the artist complained that his 'brain nearly hits his back' and his face served as a 'floor for paint droppings.' Mold, exhaustion, and grief consumed him, yet he continued. These struggles weren’t deviations—they were the work itself. His 'non finito' sculptures, figures half-emerging from marble, embody the tension between creation and incompletion. Lewis declares that these rough forms symbolize humility: greatness is not the refusal of flaws but the willingness to dwell within them.

Creative Doubt and Self-Correction

Cézanne identified with Balzac’s Frenhofer, a painter who destroys his own masterpiece because he thinks it imperfect. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called this 'Cézanne’s Doubt'—the refusal to accept earthly completion when striving toward truth. Lewis parallels this mindset to writers like Czeslaw Milosz, who claimed every book left him feeling he hadn’t unveiled enough. The energy of their doubt fueled continual pursuit. (Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of 'flow' similarly ties deep happiness to absorption, not achievement.)

Why We Need the Incomplete

Humans thrive, Lewis shows, when something remains unfinished. The Navajo weavers’ 'spirit lines' intentionally break symmetry to let the soul escape the rug’s design. Einstein joked that his own mathematical problems were 'still greater' than a child’s. Even Nobel laureates like Andre Geim voiced that discovery means leaving a field as soon as it becomes familiar. To complete nothing perfectly allows progress to continue. Imperfection becomes scaffolding; the unfinished masterpiece keeps the future open.

The Near Win

Lewis calls the near win—the silver medal, the almost-there moment—the most powerful motivator of all. She cites Olympic studies showing how second-place winners often push harder than champions. Julie Moss’s heroic crawl across the Ironman finish line, and Ben Saunders’s Arctic expeditions that suspended between triumph and failure, reveal that coming close galvanizes more ambition than victory ever could. Incompletion provides purpose—a reason to strive further. Success motivates briefly; near success can propel a lifetime.

Through these stories, Lewis turns imperfection into art’s most vital principle. Every masterpiece is unfinished—and that is its perfection. The edge of what’s missing keeps us rising toward what might yet be created.

Lewis’s chapter 'Blankness' explores creativity’s paradoxical starting point: emptiness. She recounts Paul Taylor’s infamous 1957 dance debut, 7 New Dances, which shocked audiences into walking out. Dance critic Louis Horst responded with silence—a literal blank review. That absence, Lewis argues, was a gift. It forced Taylor to redefine his art, shaping nearly every choreographic innovation that followed. Blankness, she writes, is not void but invitation—a space for new vision.

Silence, Rejection, and Renewal

Taylor’s story epitomizes the creative crucible. He blended pedestrian movements—walking, slouching, waiting—into dance, defying expectations of beauty. The audience fled; critics condemned. Yet out of humiliation grew clarity. Like Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning drawing or John Cage’s composition of silence, Taylor’s blank stage revealed what art could become when familiar measures dissolve. 'Failure,' Lewis writes, 'is a clearing, a necessary erasure for invention.' The blank review became a mirror, forcing the artist to see himself anew.

Private Domains and Safe Havens

To recover from critique, Taylor built private sanctuaries—a cold studio where ideas could simmer unseen. Lewis explores how artists shield their work during fragile early stages to silence both external and internal critics. She likens this to Rilke’s advice about embryos of feelings needing 'dark places' to grow. Whether Rodin’s veiled sculptures or August Wilson’s napkin scribbles, private domains allow incubation without judgment. Creativity, in Lewis’s view, depends on knowing when to retreat and when to engage.

Letting Critics In

But isolation alone cannot sustain growth. Taylor ultimately learned to reenter criticism through feedback and pressure. Like a residency’s creative deadline or Leonard Bernstein’s demand for 'not quite enough time,' external constraints shape mastery. For Lewis, critique is the sculptor’s chisel—painful yet clarifying. The artist must discern which pressure refines and which destroys. Harold Bloom’s 'anxiety of influence' becomes, in her telling, the engine of originality. Creative friction isn't an obstacle; it's part of the rise.

Blankness, then, is a crucible—a space of absence that births new form. The silence after failure is not emptiness but echo. Every creative endeavor begins with that quiet expanse, a place where doubt becomes design and rejection becomes resilience.

In 'Arctic Summer: Surrender,' Lewis follows explorer Ben Saunders’s trek across Antarctica to illuminate an unexpected wisdom: sometimes, the way forward is through yielding. Saunders’s journey to complete the doomed expedition of Robert Falcon Scott mirrors the book’s spiritual core—the idea that surrender, not resistance, reveals strength. From ice drift to exhaustion, Saunders learns that accepting pain allows transcendence.

The Courage to Yield

Saunders’s story transforms surrender from weakness into discipline. Alone on the ice, he faces negative drift—days of progress erased by the movement of the floes. He survives by focusing on small victories: reaching a single patch of snow ahead. Lewis compares his mindset to the principles of aikido, the martial art that uses nonresistance to neutralize force. Through the teachings of Wendy Palmer and George Leonard, she shows that relaxation under pressure grants access to greater intelligence and perception. Tighten against pain and you lose awareness; yield, and new strength flows in.

Embracing the Pain

Lewis links Saunders’s surrender to emotional contexts—grief, failure, and fear. She recounts how psychologist Pema Chödrön and Zen teachers describe accepting suffering as transformation rather than retreat. Her own grief after losing seven friends taught her that resistance deepens pain; acceptance converts it. The act of surrender, she concludes, is akin to the physics of absolute zero—an impossibility that reminds us that life always holds energy. Even in stillness, circulation continues. (Karen Armstrong’s reflections on myth and suffering echo this spiritual paradox: death and rebirth are inseparable.)

Finding Meaning in Loss

Through stories of Martin Luther King Jr. conquering his speech impediment after making peace with death, and Robert F. Kennedy reading Greek tragedy to learn endurance, Lewis illustrates how diving into pain deepens integrity. Saunders learns that letting go of control—trusting the wind, yielding to the ice—turns survival into wisdom. Surrender becomes not giving up but giving over, aligning ourselves with forces larger than ego. In this way, Lewis transforms failure into spiritual practice.

Arctic surrender teaches that progress does not always mean conquest. Sometimes, you rise because you allow yourself to fall—and in falling, discover the strength that cannot be resisted.

Lewis’s chapter on Frederick Douglass unveils the moral dimension of failure: the power of art to reconcile what’s broken. In the midst of America’s Civil War, Douglass argued that imagination—our 'picture-making faculty'—enables moral progress. Beauty, he claimed, awakens justice by expanding vision. Lewis fuses aesthetics with ethics, showing that a nation’s ability to see vividly is tied to its ability to mend.

Aesthetic Force as Awakening

Douglass delivered his 'Pictures and Progress' speech in Boston’s Tremont Temple, reminding listeners that inner images of freedom could achieve what laws alone could not. His insight foreshadowed modern neuroscience: aesthetic encounters change perception. Lewis quotes philosopher Elaine Scarry—beauty 'calls us to repair injuries in the realm of injustice.' The image of sailboats that stirred Douglass to escape slavery becomes a metaphor for visual awakening. Art doesn’t just mirror reality—it remakes it.

Seeing Differently

Lewis draws on Aristotle, Tolstoy, and Robert Legato’s film studies to reveal how vision and emotion intertwine. Awe and elevation, measured by psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Sara Algoe, are intrinsic to empathy and generosity. When we encounter beauty, our minds expand. Louis Armstrong’s jazz performance transformed young Charles Black, who later fought segregation in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. From aesthetic shock springs ethical clarity—the realization of shared humanity.

Error as Moral Insight

For Lewis, errors of perception—our blindness to injustice—can only be corrected by exposure to art’s 'beautiful disruption.' Douglass’s vision of freedom, Muybridge’s motion studies, and Earthrise’s photograph of the planet all reveal the same pattern: aesthetic experience acts as a moral telescope. It forces you to see beyond comfort zones. Failure to imagine others’ pain, Lewis argues, is the most dangerous failure of all.

In this synthesis of art and moral philosophy, Lewis shows that beauty itself contains corrective power. What stuns us can also redeem us. To see clearly—and justly—is the final rise.

The final movement of The Rise celebrates the amateur—a master who chooses to unlearn. Using Nobel laureate Andre Geim’s playful experiments, Lewis argues that innovation requires stepping outside expertise. Geim’s 'Friday Night Experiments' led him to levitate a frog—and eventually discover graphene. His willingness to 'pour water into the machine' rather than follow convention models the creative courage of deliberate amateurs everywhere.

Play as the Engine of Discovery

Lewis reveals that Geim’s success stemmed from play—the conscious act of curiosity without utility. By experimenting for fun on weekends, his lab discovered breakthroughs ignored by more rigid institutions. This resonates with NASA’s hiring of engineers who played freely as children and Twyla Tharp’s insistence that experience can 'close the door.' Real expertise demands periodic unlearning; staying too long in mastery breeds blindness—a phenomenon psychologists call the Einstellung effect.

Freedom and Risk

Drawing on Descartes, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Ludwig Börne, Lewis recounts the historical defense of ignorance as creative fuel. To become original, Börne advised, one must scrape away inherited thinking and risk foolishness. Geim embodied this ethic, crossing disciplines without fear of failure. Lewis contrasts his curiosity-driven research with the cognitive rigidity of overtrained experts. True creativity, she insists, arises when playfulness overcomes the terror of being wrong.

Play Beyond the Lab

Lewis expands the idea through diverse examples: Bogotá’s playful mayor Antanas Mockus using mimes to reform civic behavior; Ivy Ross’s 'Project Platypus' workspace at Mattel; and choreographer John Baldessari’s burning of his own paintings. Across these stories, play acts as philosophy—a way of thinking that reclaims innocence through experience. Play revives wonder, the crucial emotion that lets innovation survive its failures. (Stuart Brown’s research backs this claim: play, not work, correlates with problem-solving and emotional health.)

By the end, Lewis redefines mastery as flexible curiosity. To rise, you must learn—not only to know, but to unlearn. The deliberate amateur stays open, playful, and brave enough to begin again. In that space of exploration, failure turns into its opposite: renewal.