Name: The Rise
Rating: 4.4 (12 reviews)
Author: Sarah Lewis

What’s in it for me? Learn to see failure as the path towards mastery.

If you’ve ever had to do anything creative, you’ve experienced failure. It’s a necessary part of the creative process. But there’s more to it than that.

It turns out that when you look at how some of humanity’s greatest minds think of failure, they don’t think of it as an event to be overcome. They see it as a necessary part of the journey towards mastery.

The Rise explains why failure isn’t something to fear, but rather something to understand. How can it propel us forwards, to our successes?

In reading these blinks, you find out

why amateurs are often more creative than experts;
what martial arts can teach us about accepting failure; and
why one painter lost his mind ignoring criticism.

Mastery has nothing to do with avoiding failure; rather, it’s about relentlessly striving for more.

When people speak about artists and athletes, they often use black-and-white terms, like “good” or “bad,” “success” or “failure.” Well, that kind of hierarchical language is deeply misguided, because failure can actually help you achieve mastery.

To understand why failure can be such an advantage, first we need to understand mastery. Mastery is about endurance, not perfectionism (which is bound up in how we want others to perceive us) or success (related to particular events). In other words, mastery is the unrelenting pursuit of a goal. Think of it like chasing something that can never be caught; it’s about striving for the impossible.

Digging a little deeper, consider the Archer’s Paradox as a metaphor for the process of mastery. The Archer’s Paradox refers to the idea that the archer will draw her bow and point her arrow in a way that's intended to account for elements that are outside of her control, like weather.

So, in a sense, the archer is constantly striving to control things that cannot be controlled. And like the archer, those of us who seek mastery also try to hit the target despite facing enormous trials over which we have no control.

And since mastery is borne of this continual process of unrelenting striving, we shouldn’t even use the word “failure” to describe the difficulties we encounter on the path. Because as long as you keep working past the moment of “failure,” the event becomes a learning experience.

Not to mention, these difficulties (i.e. “failures”) can also be a form of motivation. As playwright Tennessee Williams said, “The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.”

For most of us, there’s a gap between what we have achieved and what we want to achieve.

Since failure is a misguided concept, how can we talk about unrealized achievement? Well, there’s The Gap, a term which refers to the fissure between what you have achieved and what you can achieve.

For instance, a young Hart Crane encountered The Gap when the esteemed poet Ezra Pound deemed Crane’s work “all egg” and no incubator. He meant that Crane’s poetry didn’t match his high potential. In other words: Crane was in The Gap.

Near wins compel us to confront our limitations and push past them.

Have you experienced that sinking feeling that sets in when you miss the bus by just a few seconds? It can be extremely frustrating, especially if you have somewhere important to be. Although these near wins are excruciating, they’re also necessary, because they push us forward.

This has actually been proven by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who found that near wins have a profound effect on our thinking, leading us to obsess over “what might have been.” The psychologists even found that the more frustrating the failure, the more it affects our behavior, motivating us to work harder.

In order to reach your potential, you have to surrender yourself to pain.

As we discussed in the previous blink, near misses motivate us to push past our frustration and accomplish great things. Pain is another difficulty you may have to overcome on the path to mastery: That is, you have to accept and surrender to pain to reach your potential.

Since everyone experiences tragedies, setbacks and disasters, pain is inevitable. The author was forced to face this sad fact head-on when seven dear friends all died within a year.

To get creative, embody the amateur.

If you want to accomplish great things, you have to allow yourself to experiment and play!

This idea gets right at the amateur’s advantage – that is, the benefit of having more experience than a novice, but less than an expert. So, why do amateurs have an advantage over experts? Well, amateurs act for pleasure, not money or career-related reasons – and pleasure goes hand and hand with experimentation, leading to truly original new ideas.

Key ideas in The Rise