Sarah Lewis On The Archer’s Paradox And The Creative Process

Every archer must calculate a trajectory only they can predict. The arc of the rise — the drop and horizontal shifts of an arrow’s path — must be determined before even accounting for wind speeds. Arrows are crafted such that there is some degree of displacement when the arrow leaves the bow so that the fletching doesn’t hit the string upon release. So if you are a right handed archer, you will aim slightly to the left of the bull’s-eye. The skill requires predicting the arrow’s arched flight, focusing on the mark, the wind speeds, and the many variables that can disrupt the entire thing. Archers call this process of dual focus split vision.

Sarah Lewis, in her brilliant book The Rise, writes on this process,

It also requires constant reinvention — seeing yourself as the person who can hit a ten when you just hit a nine, as an archer who just hit a seven, but can also hit an eight. Archery is one of those sports that gives instantaneous, precise feedback. It puts athletes into rank order of how they measure up against their seconds-younger selves. Archers constantly deal with the “near win”: not quite hitting the mark, but seconds later, proving that they can.

Archery is a taxing pursuit. It means spending multiple hours per day in this meditative focus of continuously trying to hit the mark. T.S. Eliot calls this “the still point of the turning world.”

This kind of grueling practice is not glamorous. Lewis talks about how the archers are caught between success (hitting the ten) and mastery (knowing it means nothing if you can’t do it again and again):

Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate — perfectionism — an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success — an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved line, constant pursuit.

One could say that innovators, entrepreneurs, Noble-prize winner’s, etc are all successful, but the reality is they are masters. Success is more of a win than it is a state. These masters did not fact have one single achievement, but rather conversions, corrections made after the feedback from the arrow’s past flight. The thing is we only see that single arrow shot — the Noble prize or the innovative product — and not the countless previous shots — the failed startups and bad experiments. We see the overnight successes, and not the 17 years before.

Sarah Lewis’s The Rise is an exceptional book. I judge a book by the number of underlines and notes I write in it, and I had plenty. She delves into the lives of contemporary and historic innovators, creators, and inventors to study what made them become who they are. One inescapable observation she made was: “Many of the things most would avoid, these individuals had turned into an irreplaceable advantage.”

She asks a very thought provoking question:

What happens when the world often assumes, before you’ve even uttered a word, that you could be a failure — based on not fitting a given expectation of the human package in which some expect to find excellence — and how have people turned that into an advantage to meet their aspirations, their dreams?

The full title of the book is The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. She writes about the advantages that come from the improbably ground of creative endeavor:

Brilliant emotions and human feats that have come from labor — an endeavor that offers the world a gift from the maker’s soul — involve a path aided by the possibility of setbacks and the inestimable gains that experience can provide. Some could say that what we call “work” often does not. “Work is what we do by the hour,” author Lewis Hyde argues, but labor “sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify…Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.”

When she mentioned the various labors, I immediately thought of Maria Popova’s cannon of work at BrainPickings — what she calls her labor of love. Popova is one of my inspirations for this blog.

The creative process is filled with setbacks and failures. The word failure itself is imperfect. It was created by bankers who used it to assess the creditworthiness in nineteenth century, a “seeming dead end forced to fit human worth.” The word seems like its always slipping away. We talk about our failures of the past, yet we don’t actually call them failures; we call them learning experiences, a low period, or a reinvention of oneself.

Its cliche to say we learn the best from failure. Its a little more nuanced than that. I think our understanding of “learning from failure” is skewed because we only hear about it from the people who learned from their low points. No one ever says, “I failed and look how bad I am now.” We only share our failures or low points in life when we have overcome them. At the time of the failure, they are called “problems we are dealing with.” The word really is imperfect.

Life is like the archer’s paradox. It is very hard to plan five, ten years from now — things just move too fast. The archer’s paradox is handling what lies outside of our control: “wind, weather, and the inevitably unpredictable movements in life. Hitting gold means learning to account for the curve embedded in our aim.”

What is really interesting about the archer’s paradox — handling what lies outside of our control — is that most things we learn from are events that happen outside of our control. Some thing happens to you without you controlling it, and you are forced to make the choice between adapting and learning, where you can then share how you failed and learned, or make the choice of letting the event overcome your human capacity.

This book is a great exploration of our human capacity. “It is the creative process — what drives invention, discovery, and culture — that reminds us of how to nimbly convert so-called failure into an irreplaceable advantage.”

Originally published at seekingintellect.com on December 23, 2014. Subscribe to the Seeking Intellect Newsletter