On Tuesday at 7:00 in the Foy Auditorium, Dr. Sarah Lewis, DuBois Scholar from Harvard, took the podium and greeted her audience. Before she began her talk, she smiled and encouraged her audience to move forward—as they hadn’t before when an organizer asked, the audience scattered around auditorium slowly got up and filled in the front of the auditorium.
This was the power of Dr. Lewis as a speaker: her voice was warm, inviting, and yet held its own kind of power that informed and inspired action. While this action was getting people to move forward, it reflected the theme of her book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.
(Picture from Amazon)
Like the people who she discussed as masters of their craft, Dr. Lewis herself is a master. She is an assistant professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University. Dr. Lewis has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art (the MoMa) and the Tate.
All of her accomplishments—inspired by her grandfather’s love of art and his stressing it to her in her youth—are testaments to her own form of mastery in her visual arts scholarship as connected to her teaching and studying African and African American Studies. Recently, Dr. Lewis was the guest editor of Aperture in its issue called “Vision & Justice,” a beautiful magazine dedicated to the positive presentation of African Americans in visual media—a magazine that has become required reading for NYU’s incoming freshman.
These points of mastery she brought to her discussion of failure: throughout the talk and Q&A, Dr. Lewis discussed how failure can proceed success in the most unthinkable ways and unexpected paths. She brought up how Dr. Martin King Jr. began his public speaking career with three C’s in public speaking class in seminary school, and then she asked if that is how we imagined a man who would later lead the nation during the Civil Rights movement with his voice. But whether the answer was yes or no, the reality was that Dr. King’s failure had raised him up to be that nationally and even internationally known voice.
(picture from The King Center)
Failure as important and necessary was the talk’s underlining message. In calling failure “a gift,” Dr. Lewis emphasized where failure teaches how to improve. She showed a quote from famous author Toni Morrison that said, if she could, she would go back and rewrite a character from her first book, The Bluest Eye, to fix the story of a character she now feels she “didn’t do justice.”
These stories, Dr. Lewis discussed, are important to understanding how failure does not stop us, but rather can help us to improve and to grow. She brought up the old Thomas Edison quote, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” That constant cycle of failure that leads to success is the heart of Dr. Lewis’ message—the “mastery” that comes from having failed and then finding the solution and in seeking out failure as a means of learning more about the solution.
Dr. Lewis’ talk overall was inspiring, heartening, and real in its focus on prizing failure as an ultimate path to success. I had the chance to meet Dr. Lewis and to get a signed copy of her book, which is available in 8 languages worldwide. Not only would I suggest reading the stories that Dr. Lewis’ book tells, but also watching her TedTalk.
You can also buy her book.