“Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It’s in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be. Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft and not for the sake of crafting your career.”
Sarah Lewis
“What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question I’ve long asked myself. I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win.”
Sarah Lewis
There’s been a resurgence in archery in the last few years. In pop culture archery has even figured prominently in some of the biggest box office movies of this century; Lord of the Rings, Brave, The Hunger Games.
In 10-zone target archery competitions the targets consist of ten rings and points are scored on a one to 10 basis depending on what circle your arrow lands on. (Of course, if you miss the target altogether that is called a miss and zero points are awarded.) The 10 ring in the center of the target is the smallest ring and most difficult to hit.
“So success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can’t do it again and again. Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though. It’s not the same as success, which I see as an event, a moment in time, and a label that the world confers upon you. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit. What gets us to do this, what get us to forward thrust more is to value the near win. How many times have we designated something a classic, a masterpiece even, while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws, in other words, a near win? Painter Paul Cézanne so often thought his works were incomplete that he would deliberately leave them aside with the intention of picking them back up again, but at the end of his life, the result was that he had only signed 10 percent of his paintings. His favorite novel was The [Unknown] Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac, and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself.”
Sarah Lewis TED talk Embrace the near win
Author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery
Tomorrow we’ll look at how, according to Lewis, the near win has inspired others.
P.S. “The aim of art is not to copy nature, but to express it. You are not a servile copyist, but a poet!”—Master painter in The Unknown Masterpiece
Related posts:
‘Failure is an option.’
Aaron Sorkin on Failure
Commitment in the Face of Failure
J.K. Rowling on the Benefits of Failure